


Miss the Train Before

by Fahye



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-03-01
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 11:18:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Containing a travel diary, one heist, two and a half love stories, and a great many technological hijinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel as though I owe fandom an apology for this one. I started it in 2009 (ergo: the characterisation herein is based firmly on Season 1) and have only just resurrected it with intent to finish. It is, more or less, an Ocean's Eleven AU.

  
_The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.  
\-- G.K. Chesterton_   


 

**SAGO STREET, CHINATOWN**

**SINGAPORE**

**NOVEMBER 12th, 11:57pm**

The city air was hot and mad, slapping against the skin like a damp flannel that left one feeling dirtier instead of cleaner. It was November and thirty-two degrees and in Merlin's opinion the whole experience was altogether bizarre; the only familiar thing was the steady drizzle of rain, as though someone had taken England and stretched it skywards, tossed down a handful of palm trees, and then kicked the thermostat up to tropical heights and stood back to watch everyone melt. Merlin couldn't imagine any self-respecting Brit actually enjoying life here, which led him to the conclusion that the man whose shop he was currently breaking into had as little respect for his heritage as he did for the law.

The screen above his keypad changed for the fifth time with a soft blip, and Merlin shifted his cramping shoulders against the concrete as a young couple walked by hand-in-hand, the girl's perilous heels clicking on the wet footpath. They spared him a single glance only; he knew what he looked like, which was a bored expat kid playing his DS and waiting for something interesting to happen. He blinked down at the new lines of code and numbers for only a moment before his fingers started to move, careful but accelerating, feeling his way into the core of the system.

There was no click, no light, but Merlin took one more glance at the code spread out legible and obedient on his screen and then levered himself off the wall and stepped in front of the sliding door. It hummed open. He stepped inside.

The interior of the shop was darker than the never-quite-night of Singapore's streets, and Merlin found his way over to the far corner by counting his footsteps from memory. The tiny computer went back into his pocket, from which he then pulled out an equally tiny torch. The patch of light illuminated the corner of the display frame, casting eerie cobweb shadows behind the twisted mass of ginseng root, and revealing the price tag: S$350,000. For a bloody _root_. For something that looked like it was grown by accident in someone's compost heap and dug up by an overenthusiastic dog.

"What rubbish," Merlin muttered to the darkness.

"Well, I will point out that nobody's _forcing_ you to steal it," came a voice from behind him, and Merlin jumped -- both around, and about half a foot into the air -- with a noise that sounded mortifyingly like he was a five-year-old girl being poked with sticks. He was on the verge of being thankful for the fact that the darkness hid what was no doubt a half-constipated, half-terrified expression, when the shop lights flickered on. This was not Merlin's best night ever.

"How did you know I was in here?"

The white-haired man with one hand still resting on the light switch gave Merlin an impressively unimpressed look. "I hope you didn't think you were being subtle, stumbling around in my security code like that. Oh, it was entertaining to watch, certainly -- not least because someone with the ability to hack _my_ system could probably rob half the casinos and more than a few of the banks in this city, so the fact that you went to all this trouble to steal a ginseng root suggests some new, bewildering brand of stupidity."

Merlin felt like he'd been hit in the face with a brick wrapped in cotton wool. He couldn't think of anything to say apart from, "I'm _not_ stupid," and even that came out far more plaintively than he'd have liked.

"Obviously you possess some minor genius for decryption, or we wouldn't be standing here," the man said. "But I remain unconvinced that you're not, in addition, an idiot."

This was getting out of hand. "You're Gaius, right?" Merlin blurted. "I'm Merlin Emrys. Hunith's son."

Gaius's unimpressed look continued for a long few seconds, and then his eyebrows shot up. "You know, Merlin Emrys," he said, "normal people use telephones to get in touch with old friends of the family. And they wait until civilised hours of the day to do so."

Merlin shrugged. "I guess I wanted to show you that I'm not. Normal, I mean."

Gaius heaved a sigh. "You'd better come into the tea room. All these lights and chatter, people might get the impression that I'm actually open."

Merlin followed him through a narrow doorway into another dark room, and stood there thinking wistful thoughts about his hotel's blissfully arctic airconditioning while Gaius turned on the lights. Merlin's shirt was sticking to his back and despite how silly it looked, he envied Gaius the dressing gown of fake Chinese silk that the man was wearing. Merlin had seen similar garments for sale in the markets, dirt-cheap and gaudy, but this one was hideous even by those standards, with enormous splashes of orange and a pattern of puce-coloured cranes that might have looked graceful from a distance but up close looked as though they had been hatched in a swamp following an unfortunate nuclear accident.

"Sit down." Gaius waved him onto a tiny stool facing a table with a slotted top, upon which were arranged a series of tiny cups, a teapot that looked too small to be of any use whatsoever, and a supiciously steaming kettle.

"Were you expecting me?"

"Hardly." Gaius took a seat on the other side of the table and began to scoop green leaves into the improbable teapot. "I thought Hunith's son was still a child, not old enough to be working, and I certainly didn't expect him to turn up on my doorstep. No, I just wanted to have a chat with the person who managed to bypass most of my alarms, whoever he or she might turn out to be." He poured steaming water into the teapot and gave it only a few thoughtful twirls before upending the pot over the cups in a rapid, careless manner more suited to a bartender than someone making tea.

"What kind of tea is it?" Merlin asked. It was somehow comforting that even in Singapore in the middle of the night, the English would offer tea to unexpected visitors. Though he'd never seen it made like this before, with the strange combination of ceremony and haphazard action.

"Oolong. Smell, pour it in here, drink," Gaius ordered, indicating a tall narrow cup and a small shallow one in turn.

Merlin did as he was told; the tea smelled like buttered cabbage and tasted quite like it as well, but it wasn't entirely unpleasant, and Gaius was sipping his own cup with evident enjoyment, so he said nothing and drained it in two small mouthfuls.

"How's your mother?"

"She's doing well." Merlin swirled the dregs. "She told me to find you because I've got a job, and she thinks you're the best person to help."

"I'm retired," Gaius said sternly. "I am living a peaceful life learning the ancient arts of Chinese herbal medicine and tea-making. I'm afraid I can't help you, Merlin. Hunith should have known better than to send you all the way to Singapore on a fool's errand."

"She said you'd say that," Merlin agreed. "She also said to remind you that you've owed her a favour since New York, and she's calling it in."

Gaius made a huffing sort of sound and poured more water into the pot. The leaves had swelled into a sluggish green clump. "Is that so."

"Afraid so, yes."

"Well, as it appears I am to have no choice in the matter, drink your tea and tell me more about your mother and what you've been doing with your life. Then go back to wherever it is you're staying. It's too late for talking business, and I know somewhere we can meet tomorrow morning." His expression as he dribbled tea into Merlin's cup this time was bordering on sullen. Merlin had rather been hoping for at least a smidgen of enthusiasm, or at least someone who didn't say the words _minor genius_ as though they were only one step above an outright insult, but his mother had been insistent: Gaius was the best.

He drank his tea.

***

**CHRISTMAS GIFT BAZAAR, NGEE ANN CITY**

**SINGAPORE**

**NOVEMBER 13th, 10:23am**

" _This_ is your idea of a good place for talking business?" Merlin hollered.

"Crowds," Gaius said, as though it were an explanation. "Hold this." He handed Merlin a plastic car the size of a shoebox and began to dig through some WALL*E merchandise.

Crowds indeed; Merlin, born and raised in middling-town England, had never seen anything like the throng of people loudly enjoying their shopping experience in the enormous mall, and this self-proclaimed Bazaar was the worst of all. The word called up images of carpets and spices, but this was a brand-name haven of, as far as Merlin could make out, complete _junk_. Most of it produced by some subsidiary of Disney.

"As I was saying," Merlin yelled, his concerns about privacy somewhat allayed by the fact that most of the conversations around them were being held in a) Mandarin, and b) a tone suggesting no interest whatsoever outside of the speaker’s own practically negative personal space, "I was approached directly about this job, but I don’t have any experience in running something this big, or any contacts to speak of. So my mother told me to come to you."

"Why were you approached in the first place?" Gaius, a sticker book in either hand, looked back over his shoulder. "If you are, as you say, so devoid of experience."

Merlin could already feel himself blushing; this always sounded so much more ridiculous aloud than it did when it appeared in admiring blog entries and emails. "I'm the Boy Wizard."

"You what?" Gaius seemed to be paying far more attention to a bin full of shoddy screwdriver sets than to anything Merlin was saying.

"I said, I'm the _Boy Wizard_ ," he repeated, loudly enough that a pigtailed girl, barely taller than Merlin's knee and clutching a box that was probably the same blinding shade of pink as Merlin's cheeks, turned around and shrieked " _Harry Potter?!_ " with manic and heavily-accented enthusiasm.

"Er, no," Merlin told her. "Sorry. Merry Christmas. Enjoy your -- Miley Cyrus Barbie. Um. Lovely."

"I hope you aren't expecting that name to mean something to me," Gaius said, and then turned around and frowned. "Hold on…were you the one who pulled that stunt with the LSE's Professional Securities display screens?"

"No," said Merlin hastily. "I -- never mind. Don't bother about it." Oh, this was going fantastically. "I was offered the job because the backer had heard of my work."

"What is this job?" Three soft toys were piled on top of the car in Merlin's arms.

" _Who_ are we shopping for?" asked Merlin, distracted. "Do you have grandchildren?"

"No." Gaius sighed. "My sister does, however. Unholy numbers of them. And as I have managed to avoid producing any descendents of my own, she likes to insist that I spoil hers."

"Uh huh." A stuffed bear began to make a stealth attempt at sliding towards the side of the slippery box; Merlin ducked sideways to save it and almost collided with a couple of elderly ladies. "Sorry! Sorry."

"The job," Gaius reminded him.

"A single object from a private collection," Merlin recited. "The mark's name is Uther Pendragon."

" _Hah_." Gaius's bark of laughter was loud enough that a small radius of people turned around and glanced at them. "Of course it is. For my sins, I surmise."

"You know him?"

"I know the name. Do you usually attract enormous problems for yourself with so little effort, Merlin?"

"My mother says I have a knack for it," Merlin said, grinning.

"Your mother is a smart woman." Gaius looked around. "And hopefully she trained you worth a damn. I'd like to see you lift a wallet."

"What?" Merlin's throat seized up.

Gaius gave him the look from the previous night, the one which questioned Merlin's intelligence. "We're in a crowd. The conditions are ideal. Surely Hunith taught you…" He trailed off at the look on Merlin's face. "Or not. I revise my earlier opinion; your mother is either very stupid, or even smarter than I thought."

"Hey!" said Merlin, and then, "What?" again.

"Very sneaky of her, to stick you under my nose and flaunt your lack of basic education." Gaius waggled a plastic cup at him sternly. "I most certainly did not intend to spend my retirement running a school for amateurs, but I suppose I have no choice now. Very well. Watch closely."

And Merlin _was_ watching closely, but he still couldn't quite see what happened; one second Gaius was struggling with an armful of junk, scrabbling to keep it all together as a young couple passed by them, and the next he was dropping a purple wallet onto the ground and elbowing his way towards the tills, money in hand.

"Are you coming, Merlin?" he called.

***

**NEWTON HAWKER CENTRE**

**SINGAPORE**

**NOVEMBER 13th, 7:18pm**

"No, I don't -- I'm fine! We're looking! Thank you! No!"

If one more person tried to shove a menu into Merlin's hands or herd him towards a table, he was going to punch them in the face. Which would probably be embarrassing for everyone concerned and most especially him, because Gaius probably possessed the ability to kill people with his little finger or something equally freakish, whereas Merlin wasn't even sure where your thumb was supposed to go when you made a fist.

"Have you ever killed anyone?" he said before he could think it through. The girl currently approaching them with a teatowel and a hopeful expression stopped dead in her tracks; the hopeful expression turned into one that showed her opinion of them stuggling between potential customers and potential murderers. Good. Merlin would have hated to punch _her_ in the face.

Meanwhile, Gaius was giving him a weird look. "What sort of stories has Hunith been telling about me?"

"All terrible ones. Oh, coconut juice!"

"Go and buy us drinks, then." Gaius waved him off. "I'll order the food."

When Merlin returned to the table, hands sliding on the condensation that the brimming plastic cups had erupted with in response to the evening heat, Gaius was glowering at servers from beneath one lowered eyebrow and looking satisfied beneath the other one, which Merlin was beginning to suspect he'd had surgically pinned halfway up his forehead.

"What's so bad about Uther Pendragon?" Merlin asked, sliding onto the circular seat.

Gaius made a 'humph' sound that was probably a laugh. "For one thing, he's a criminal prosecution lawyer, so if we get caught then he'll take great delight in screwing us over personally."

"Oh, brilliant." Merlin gave a rueful smile. "What else?"

"Where would you like me to start? He's smart, he's filthy rich, he's passionate about his collection, and he's as paranoid as you would be if you'd put away most of the big names in British organised crime. Which brings me to the last thing: this is almost certainly a revenge job."

"Which is -- bad?"

A pause; Gaius looked like he was weighing a thought. "Not entirely," he said eventually. "The backer at least had the sense to hire an impartial team. As long as he doesn't start micromanaging, I don't think you need worry overmuch about motives. Do what you're being paid to do. That's all. Thank you," he added; someone was sliding plates of steaming food onto the table between them, plates and more plates -- just how much had Gaius ordered? -- each one looking slightly odd but smelling divine.

Merlin's excitement was rapidly being replaced by trepidation, and he wondered if he shouldn't be learning the ropes on something less huge. Except -- "Well, it does sound tough, but you haven't told me to turn the job down."

"True." And Gaius smiled at him, an abrupt smile that was a lot kinder and more mischievous than Merlin had expected. "There must be some ego in me yet; the idea of making Uther Pendragon's life a little harder is not a completely unpleasant one. And I think I've found you a likely team."

 _Impartial_ , Merlin thought. _Is that so?_

But he'd seen that look in his mother's eyes when she talked about jobs: something subtle and proud. He felt a trickle of relief. "Thank you. Really."

Gaius waved that away. "Tech first. I know a man who's been in the business for years -- very dependable -- should be able to rig anything we need for a private collection job. You'll pick him up in Prague."

"Me?"

"Yes, Merlin, you." Gaius dug an irritated fork into the nearest pile of noodles. "I have no intention of jetsetting around the globe at my age, and I'm not simply picking up the phone to ask favours on _your_ behalf when most of my contacts don't know you from Adam. I'll hire them, but you'll pick them up yourself. It's only polite."

"Right, of course," Merlin said, or tried to say; he'd discovered how good the fish tasted when you dipped it in a kind of fantastic spicy sauce thing, and had loaded his fork with what was, in retrospect, an overoptimistic amount of food. So what came out of his mouth was in fact, "Rhhhhyg," and a small dribble of sauce.

Gaius rolled his eyes above his own mouthful of noodles, and they ate in silence for a while. What had looked like far too much food turned out to be just about perfect; it was all delicious, and Merlin inhaled two platefuls before chewing slowly and contentedly through a few more. The hawker centre was filling up, families and groups of young people pouring themselves around tables and adding to the noise. The air was thick with darkening heat, seafood, wet concrete, spices and cooked meats, and as he ate Merlin imagined himself reaching a strange kind of equilibrium with the fragrant chaos; he still didn't understand Singapore, but he was beginning to get a feel for it.

Finally, he let his fork fall onto a pile of prawn tails and smiled. "Prague," he said. "Then...?"

Gaius had stopped eating a good ten minutes ago, and there was a bemused expression on his face that bespoke a familiarity with the eating habits of young people. "Then Edinburgh," he said, running a finger around the rim of his empty cup. "The one good thing about stealing from Uther Pendragon is that I can get us an inside player, and she'll meet you there. Then Paris, and then you'll all make your way to my house."

"Back to Singapore?" Merlin frowned. "When the job's in London?"

"No, not my house here -- grow a brain, boy, I'm not training you lot out of my tea shop. Another one."

"Where is it?"

"Somewhere in Italy," Gaius said firmly. "I'll call you when you need to know more than that. But we're not working to a tight deadline, so you're not going anywhere until you're not a disgrace to your mother's name."

Merlin, bare forearms pressed against the elusive once-coolness of the table, rested his chin on the uppermost arm and thought longingly about his computer; about the effortless thrill of finding gaps in things that had been created to be watertight. About the things he just _knew_ , the patterns that spun apart when his mind and typing fingers teased the right thread. He'd never had to work to be good at it, and nobody had ever tried to educate him outside of his own inclinations.

He spared a quick thought of mixed fondness and annoyance for his mother. Packing him off to Gaius had clearly been a characteristically double-edged blade of a suggestion. "Training?" he said, resigned.

"Training." Gaius gave the kind smile again. "Don't worry, enjoy your evening. We'll start tomorrow."

Merlin closed his eyes and let the night swallow his skin.

***

**FLIGHT BA133**

**NOVEMBER 23rd, 10:49pm**

"… _keep_ ing in _mind_ that it _may_ be be _hind_ you."

The flight attendents were doing the pointing-out-the-exits dance, somewhere between flagless semaphore and a seriously weird version of the breaststroke, and whoever was narrating the safety demonstration seemed to have made the terrible decision that the best way to maintain the interest of a plane full of bored passengers was to recite it in soporific dactyls. Merlin waited until the man beside him was absorbed in the way the deflated lifejacket sat perkily on the navy-clad breasts of the nearest flight attendent, and then lifted the guy's wallet as he, Merlin, leaned down to fiddle with own backpack. Which was, yes, safely stowed under the seat in front of him.

There wasn't much hope that the theft would go unnoticed throughout the eight-hour flight, but it was enough that the man hadn't noticed it initially; this wasn't a job, just an exercise, and it looked like Gaius's training was starting to pay off. Merlin straightened up, wallet in his palm, and held it out.

"Did you drop this? It was on the floor."

The man patted his pocket automatically, even though his eyes had already widened in recognition behind his glasses. "Yeah, that's mine, thanks."

"Not at all." Merlin handed it back to him and fished in his own pocket for a mint to suck on; the plane was about to take off. He was tired and didn't fancy being a jetlag zombie while trying to prove himself to more experienced professionals, so he spent takeoff wriggling himself into the most comfortable position possible -- which wasn't all that comfortable, considering his long bony limbs and the fact that his Economy-grade seat seemed to be inching closer to the one in front when it thought Merlin wasn't paying attention, but good enough -- and then plugged in his noise-cancelling headphones once the plane had levelled out.

Merlin turned the inflight radio to a comedy channel, jabbed the volume down low, and fell asleep to the sound of Monty Python informing him that watery tarts going around distributing swords was not a reasonable basis for a system of government.

Fair enough, he thought.

***

**CHARLES BRIDGE**

**PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC**

**NOVEMBER 25th, 7:00am**

The instructions that Merlin had received from Gaius’s shadowy contact in Prague were simply: Charles, Christopher, dawn. Figuring that he was a pretty poor hacker if he could decode Sotheby’s website security system but not a three-word message, he made sense of it with the help of a hastily-purchased guidebook, and duly dragged himself out into the crystal cold darkness of the winter dawn.

The bridge was thankfully not far from his rather dodgy hotel, and it was deserted except for a couple of men his own age who appeared to be adjusting some scaffolding, and a young woman leaning against the stone and staring out over the Vltava. St Christopher, Wikipedia had assured Merlin, was the sixth statue on the south side of the bridge, not far from where the girl was standing. Merlin peered up at the shadowy saint; there was nothing distinguishing about him apart from the stone baby perched on his stone shoulder.

Gaius's contact was clearly nowhere in sight just yet, so Merlin tried to distract himself from the fact that he couldn’t feel the tip of his nose by looking at his guidebook’s pictures. In the emerging dawn light he could make out St Vitus (who had long hair which made him look rather a ponce and was, unsurprisingly, the patron saint of dancers) and St Wenceslas (who apparently had never been a king, nor done anything in his life more exciting than be killed by his brother, but who had nevertheless been enthusiastically adopted and celebrated by the Czechs ever since a random Englishman decided to write a Christmas carol about him, presumably because his name scanned nicely).

"Merlin Emrys?"

When Merlin turned, the young woman was a lot closer, and was giving him a hesitant smile.

"Yes?"

"Oh, good." She took two more steps to halt in front of him, and her smile grew wider. Three small tendrils of frizzy hair had escaped from her beanie and were brushing in front of her eyes. "I'm Guinevere Smith, but everyone calls me Gwen. I'm your contact." She gave an abortive giggle. "I've never been a contact before. It does sound very dark and mysterious, doesn't it?"

Merlin's face was doing its best to return her smile, which was infectious, but his confusion won out for a moment. "I -- yes. Sorry, I was told you'd be, you know. A man."

"I'm as good as," she said cheerfully. Then she blinked and amended, "Well, not really. The man was my dad, the man you were meant to meet with, and of course I'm not as good as _him_ , but he couldn't make it so he sent me. I mean, that’s not to say that a woman can't do as good a job as a man! Generally speaking. Um."

"Will your father be joining us later?" Merlin intervened, taking pity.

Gwen tucked her hands under her arms and shrugged. "He's got a lot of contracts at the moment, and some of them are taking a lot longer than expected. But he put together all the tech that Gaius asked for, and I can install and run all of the components."

Merlin firmly quashed the faint dubiousness he was feeling, figuring that objecting to her age would be the silliest kind of hypocrisy, and reached out to pat her on the arm through her puffy white jacket. "Well, I'm looking forward to working with you, Gwen Smith."

"You too! This is my first real job, you know," she added, looking excited.

"Er, mine too, actually," Merlin admitted. "Not my first job. But the first time I've actually stolen a _thing_ , or worked with other people."

Gwen nodded and leaned out over the side of the bridge again. "And is this your first visit to Prague?"

"Yes."

"I love this bridge, but you have to come early -- as soon as the sun gets up there are tourists everywhere, even in winter. I like coming here to look at the statues. Anthony of Padua’s my favourite." She indicated. Anthony of Padua’s head was adorned with what looked to be a hat made of small golden helicopter blades, atop which was huddled a chilly-looking pigeon.

"They do seem rather keen on their saints," Merlin offered.

Gwen nodded. "I like that. I like that this city remembers its dead. It doesn’t glamorise them, or dwell on them, but it remembers.”

Merlin watched the growing trickle of people passing them on the bridge and thought about what he'd read about the city and he couldn’t make the idea fit, to begin with, because everything around him was chilled and bullied into a busyness of life. But he'd been to the markets the night before, in a square where the church rose greenlit and imposing above even the highest star on the Christmas tree, and elsewhere in the city there were more statues and monuments and lists; the city had defined itself on the efforts of royalty and martyrs known not for their lives but for the manner of their deaths; in old buildings in every cobbled corner of Prague, people of every faith worshipped between walls covered with the names of the dead. And the city remembered. Yes, Merlin could feel that.

Gwen tucked her arm through his and smiled up at him, bringing him back to himself. "So, Merlin Emrys, what're we stealing?"

"Nothing huge," Merlin said. "Just some sword."


	2. Chapter 2

**FLIGHT BA560**

**NOVEMBER 26th, 9:40am**

_from: (address hidden)_  
 _to: boy.wizard@gmail.com_  
 _date: 25 November 2008 17:57_  
 _subject: your quest_

_\---_

_Greetings, young Wizard -_

_Now that destiny has seen fit to deliver you into my hands, I can only trust that you will prove a worthy instrument for the great task ahead._

_To satisfy any misgivings you may have about removing the sword Excalibur from Uther Pendragon's possession: I can tell you very little, but you should know that he was never meant to own it. It was fated for another._

_\- the Dragon_

_\---_

"How helpful," Merlin muttered at his laptop. He whacked the keys a little harder than necessary as he logged out and then in to his personal account, and deleted five Facebook notifications that he had no intention of ever reading.

Gwen's glance at his inbox was just a little too long for her to pretend that she wasn’t stickybeaking. "Oh, do you email your mother?" she asked, sounding delighted. Merlin didn't have the heart to tell her that he wasn't _exactly_ the type to keep up a faithful correspondence with his mother; rather, his mother was the type to keep ruthless tabs on him via electronic guilt.

"Yes," he said instead, and tilted the screen so that she could see.

_from: h.d.emrys@gmail.com_  
 _to: merlin.emrys@gmail.com_  
 _date: 25 November 2008 09:59_  
 _subject: checking in :)_

_\---_

_hi darling,_

_ignore gaius when he gets like that, you know he's just grumpy at me for not living up to his silly standards of 'essential education'. hope you're keeping your mouth shut and learning everything you can. i talked to ronald about the guardian site and he says to start at the archives and construct your links backwards instead of going the other way. hope that helps!!_

_keep safe and don't forget to wear your woollen thermals, it gets chilly in scotland._

_all my love,_

_mum xx_

_ps. will says 'skype me you daft prick' which he assures me is an expression of affection_

_\---_

"That's sweet of her." Gwen tapped her fingers on her inflight magazine. "What're you working on?" she added, indicating the other tabs.

"Editing Wikipedia articles." Merlin grinned. "What about you, have you found some good duty free stuff?"

Gwen flicked open to where one finger was holding her place. It was an article about, as far as Merlin could tell, the design process for British Airways' new line of uniforms for their flight attendants.

"You have odd interests," Merlin told her.

"So do you. I guess it comes with the profession." Gwen nodded at his meal, which had been shoved half onto her seat tray to make room for his laptop. "Are you going to eat your jelly?"

"No," Merlin said firmly, and passed it over. "It looks like glue. Radioactive glue."

"I think it tastes fine." Gwen lifted the plastic lid. The jelly quivered smugly. Merlin eyed the empty containers crammed together on her tray and compared it to his own half-hearted effort at getting through the aeroplane food; Gwen noticed and smiled around the a spoonful of lurid red jelly already in her mouth. "I'm not very fussy. Might be self-defence against Dad's cooking."

"Is it just you and your dad, then?" It was a bit of a leap, but there was something about the way Gwen mentioned her father -- light fondness covering a strong, defensive attachment -- that resonated with Merlin.

"Yeah. My mum died when I was a baby, so it's just the two of us." She glanced at him; calm enough to forestall any apology, and piercing enough that Merlin wasn't surprised when she said:

"You and your mum?"

Merlin nodded. "I don't know who my dad is. But we live in a pretty small town, so there was always someone to look after me if Mum was away on a job. How long have you lived in Prague?"

"A few years -- we were in Boston before that, and Madrid before that. Dad can work from anywhere, so we travel a lot. He thinks it's good for my education. Not that there's anything wrong with living in one place," she added, with an anxious look. "I'm sure you're very educated. Oh God. That sounded patronising, didn't it? I didn't mean --"

"Gwen!" Merlin grinned. "It's okay."

"Have you always wanted to work in the industry?" Gwen asked hastily. "Sometimes I wonder what it might have been like if I'd tried something else, but Dad loves teaching me, and I like being able to help him."

Merlin laughed. "Honestly? Mum tried to yell me into doing anything else, but this is all I'm good at. She gave up when I was sixteen and got me some proper training."

"Dad said that _Gaius_ said that you're one of the best natural hackers he's come across," Gwen said then, as though confiding a secret, and Merlin's heart -- or maybe his ego -- grew a size. _Hah_. "You should tell your mother," she added, poking at his laptop. "Sounds like she'd be very proud."

"Normal mothers are proud of their sons for winning sports trophies, or getting into medical school," Merlin pointed out. "Do you think we're victims of moral corruption?"

"I guess we must be," Gwen said solemnly, and filled her mouth with jelly.

Merlin smiled as he turned back to Wikipedia. This trip wasn't going to be bad at all.

***

**ST MARGARET'S CHAPEL, EDINBURGH CASTLE**

**EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND**

**NOVEMBER 28th, 12:38pm**

"Did you know," chirrupped Gwen, who was nose-deep in her sodden pamphlet, "that this is the oldest building in Edinburgh Castle? Isn't that fascinating?"

Merlin tried to reply in the affirmative but was too busy fighting his way out of his man-eating poncho for the fifth time in as many minutes. He could barely hear her educational chatter over the sound of blue plastic flapping in the wind, and the bloody thing seemed to have grown three extra holes for limbs, none of which were in the right position for him to free his hands and wrestle the thing back into position.

"Fascinating!" he managed to shout, eventually.

"Oh, here." Gwen tugged at one side of the poncho and Merlin found himself able to breathe again, though the biting wind and practically horizontal rain that were waiting to smack him in the face were only marginally better than suffocating inside his own garment. "You alright, Merlin?"

"Yep. Fantastic." Merlin's fringe was dripping into his eyes and he couldn't feel parts of his right hand. "Let's get inside this incredibly old chapel, shall we?"

Following the pamplet, they had crawled through a series of gatehouses and up the unforgiving, rain-darkened cobbles that wound through the castle complex. Down on the Royal Mile the weather had seemed merely unpleasant -- and almost like coming home to Merlin, after Singapore's heat and Prague's dry freeze -- but up on Castle Rock it was another story altogether. Gwen's umbrella had turned inside-out about fifteen seconds after she opened it, with the kind of violent kamikaze lurch that told the owner that if the umbrella wasn't forced back into the correct position and closed immediately, the next gust of wind would transform it from a functioning tool into shreds of fabric hanging from twisted metal. Between them they did manage to close it, but that left Gwen with no protection and Merlin with only his evil poncho.

"Phew." Gwen gave a rueful smile as they squeezed into the chapel and began to drip industriously onto the stone floor. "Old and tiny it may be, but at least it has a roof."

St Margaret's Chapel was extremely minimalist as places of worship went, but the whitewashed interior and the simple grey arch managed to give an impression of light despite the small area and the sounds of the rain. Aside from the embroidered altar cloth the decoration was limited to a few bunches of fresh flowers and some deeply-set stained glass, thin collections of colour depicting a handful of saints; saints, again. It seemed like you couldn't turn around in Europe without elbowing a culture's venerations, stumbling into spaces once held holy, and even in such a humble church as this one there was a weight and an age to the air that made Merlin want to tread silently.

Wooden waveform seats lined the walls, and the only other person in the chapel was seated halfway along one of them, sitting bolt upright and reading a slim paperback, so still and vivid that she looked almost like a work of art herself. After a few moments of damp rustling in which Gwen and Merlin managed to regain their breath and blink their eyelashes apart, she glanced over at them.

"Goodness," she said, "it is pouring down," and it took Merlin a moment to realise that the rain hadn't actually damaged his hearing: her accent was Irish. After a morning spent being bombarded by cheery Scottish, it sounded very strange.

"Is your name Morgana LeFay?"

"Yes, that's me." Morgana put the book away in a bag and stood up. She was wearing a pale trenchcoat and dark gloves but didn't look at all wet; her hair fell from under a white beret in long, dry, shining black curls.

"Have you been here long?" Merlin asked. "Your email did say twelve-thirty, didn’t it?"

"About an hour," she said calmly. "I came early; it's a nice place to read. And luckily, I missed the worst of the rain on the way up."

"I'm Merlin Emrys, this is Gwen Smith."

"Pleased to meet you both." Morgana flashed a smile and moved past them to glance at the sky. "It looks like we're going to have to make a dash for it. The café's probably our best chance, we can have some lunch and talk where there's less chance of being interrupted by tourists."

Feeling like a diver unsure of when he would next have the opportunity to break surface, Merlin clutched his poncho tightly around himself and took a deep breath before plunging out into the weather again. The café was not far away but it required a slippery descent over the cobbles, all the while feeling vaguely as though he should be on hand to help Gwen if she slipped, and suspecting that it was far more likely that _he_ would be the one to topple over and brain himself. The wind was beating at his poncho, setting it rippling and straining like a sail; one too-violent gust and he'd probably be a morbid curiosity in the paper, _Tourist Dies In Freak Storm Atop Castle Rock_. His mother would reach into the afterworld and throttle him herself for daring to die in her absence.

"Merlin!" Morgana, her hair striped across her face, grabbed his hand for long enough to tug him through the door of the building. Merlin looked down to make sure he didn't trip on the mat or anything equally embarrassing and noticed firstly that she was wearing heels -- how the hell had she stayed upright? -- and secondly that their gloves were the same shade of dark grey, gone almost black with the rain. It made Merlin feel better, grounded, in a way that he hadn't known he needed. The way she'd taken his hand like it was nothing, the way Gwen was holding the door open and only trying half-heartedly to hide her giggles at his inelegant flails. Merlin remembered his mother saying, only half-mocking, _you watch out that you still remember me, Merlin, when your first team becomes your family_ , and he'd laughed and kissed her cheek and told her not to be silly. But here he was, having known Gwen a handful of days and Morgana less than an hour, and he could feel the first dim stirrings of...something. Potential.

"I'm fine. Thanks." He wrestled the poncho off over his head with a sigh of relief.

The instant Morgana's coat was off, Gwen made a sound of feminine joy and touched her shoulder. "Your dress! It's beautiful, is it vintage?"

"Yes." Morgana's face lit up with pleasure, which combined with her now-bedraggled hair to make her look much less like a painting and more like a person. "I found it in a tiny place in Soho; I must take you there when we're in London."

"Oh, the fabric is so well preserved." Gwen turned her wide eyes on Merlin. "Don't you think it's lovely?"

Merlin looked at Morgana's dress. It was...blue. With a white thing around the waist.

"Yes?" he ventured.

Morgana laughed and inclined her head as graciously as if he'd showered her with effusive praise. "Thank you, Merlin. Let's get some food."

The food turned out to be surprisingly good for a tourist facility; Merlin picked up a ham and salad roll, the largest possible cup of coffee, and a brownie that was the size of his fist. His tray had barely touched the table, however, when a shot cracked through the air, loud and unmistakably near. His knuckles turned white and everything on his tray rattled with the force of his violent startlement. "What --"

Gwen glanced at her watch; Morgana was doing the same. "It's the One O'Clock Gun," Gwen told him. Her pamplet had disappeared, but she recited seemingly from memory: "They've fired it every day since 1861, when it was established as a time signal for ships. The current gun dates from 2001, though."

The provision of an explanation did nothing to decelerate Merlin's heart, which was drumming away in residual panic. He took a gulp of coffee, promptly burned his tongue, and lifted the lid to let it cool.

"How do you know Gaius?" he asked Morgana, who was stirring her tea and once again looking far more elegant than should reasonably be possible ten minutes after emerging from a downpour.

"He got me out of trouble once," she said. "We were running two short cons in the same place; mine went sour, and he managed to save my skin. What do you owe him?"

"Me? Nothing." Merlin grinned. "Mostly I think he's scared of my mum."

***

**CHRISTMAS MARKET**

**EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND**

**NOVEMBER 28th, 8:02pm**

"Gingerbread."

"Snowglobes, over there."

"Ooh! Alarming-looking meat products in bread." Gwen removed a hand from the pocket of her coat for long enough to point. "Less alarming then the ones in Prague, though."

"Mulled wine."

"Honeyed mead, to the left," Morgana joined in, smiling. "It's true, the Christmas markets in Europe are similar everywhere you go."

Merlin, who hadn't tried honeyed mead during his single visit to the Prague markets, directed them towards that stall, where a woman wearing an enormous scarf in the same shade of red as Merlin's sold him a mug of steaming golden liquid that smelt divine.

"Three pounds deposit on the mug," Merlin said, bemused, wrapping his hands around it. "I haven't had to _hire_ crockery before."

"Doesn't look like it's worth three pounds." Morgana eyed it. Her thoughtful expression gave the impression that she could place a value on anything from a nail file to a human soul. "Though I suppose that's the point." She paused. "You could almost run a profit, if you somehow prevented people from returning them."

"If you packed up the stall and ran?" Gwen smiled. "Doesn't seem very feasible."

Merlin was momentarily distracted from the conversation by the mead itself, which was indeed honeyed and delicious and alcoholic in a soothing way, as though getting paralytically drunk on this stuff would be as easy and delightful as lowering oneself into a warm bath. When he'd emptied a third of the mug he tuned back in, only to discover that Morgana was musing about the kind of merchandise that one could use for a con based on hiring things out.

"One job at a time," Merlin pleaded, and Morgana laughed.

The markets were certainly a lot like the ones in Prague, right down to the juxtaposition of towering ancient architecture with gaudy modern consumerism, except they were marginally less crowded and people were speaking English. Sort of. And where Prague's had included a stage full of endearingly talentless dancing children, Edinburgh's markets went in for activities. A ferris wheel rose neon and magnetic above the crowds, with smaller rides clustered around its base like noisy foothills. There was even a small ice rink on a lower level than the market itself, and Merlin leaned against a railing -- wincing at the metal chill against his arms, even through his coat -- sipped at his mead, and watched the vivid chaos on the ice.

Gwen had acquired a cup of coffee, and Morgana was managing to eat a skewer's worth of chocolate-coated strawberries with something approaching elegance. Merlin was no longer surprised; Morgana would probably look elegant halfway down a fireman's pole in the middle of the Antarctic.

"Gaius wanted me to recruit you because you know the Pendragons," Merlin said. "Are you sure you're okay with stealing from your friends?"

Morgana made a so-so motion with her head as she swallowed a mouthful of food. "Friends isn't quite how I'd put it. My parents knew Arthur's mother, and Uther by extension. Arthur and I were socialised a lot as children; I think we were supposed to be sibling substitutes for each other."

"Arthur being the son." Merlin had been doing some research and knew the basics about Arthur Pendragon, motherless heir to a tidy fortune, final-year LLB student at UCL.

"I only see Arthur at parties these days, and he manages to insult me creatively every single time." Morgana gave a dismissive flick of her skewer. "He's spoiled and arrogant, and his father is twice as bad. I have no qualms when it comes to stealing from Uther Pendragon."

Merlin thought about Gaius' dry voice: _the idea of making Uther Pendragon's life a little harder is not entirely unpleasant._

"Sounds like he's got no shortage of enemies," he said.

"Unsurprisingly. He's bankrupted or jailed more major criminals than any other single prosecutor in the world." Morgana gave a sigh. "Which would be admirable, I suppose, if he weren't also such an unremitting _bastard_."

"And a paranoid one," Gwen put in. "Dad wouldn't stop talking about how his security system is far better than it needs to be for a private collection. I hope you really are talented, Merlin. I mean, I don't doubt that you _are_ \--"

"I hope so too." Merlin squeezed her arm. The best way to save Gwen from herself, he was learning, was to intervene before she could say too much.

"Merlin, your pocket is singing," Gwen said then.

Merlin drained the last inch of cooling mead and fished his mobile phone out of his pocket with his free hand. The warbling polyphonic tune was only just audible over the market din.

"Ah, Merlin," Gaius said, as soon as Merlin had helloed. "The Florentine police report --"

"Fixed," Merlin said. "See, you didn't need to worry about it."

"Well. Good," Gaius said grudingly. "How's the recruitment business going?"

"Fine! Morgana's showing us around the markets, and we're on a flight to Paris tomorrow. I still think I could have handled the bookings --"

"We're keeping those parts of the job legal, Merlin. It'll hardly serve our purpose if you're arrested before we can even get you to London."

"It would have been -- wait, you're at your place in Italy, aren't you?" Merlin frowned, listening hard. "I thought I heard someone speaking English. In the background."

"My housekeeper speaks English", Gaius said, in what Merlin was already coming to recognise as his _don't argue with me Merlin_ voice. It was unnnervingly similar to his mother's version of the same sentiment.

"Right," Merlin said cheerfully. "Though I'd like to go on record as saying that I think you're hiding something."

"Me?" said Gaius, with gloomy sarcasm. "Patience, Merlin."

"I know, I know, it's all of the learning curve. All things will be revealed in time. My education is --"

"Good _bye_ , Merlin."

"Bye." Merlin grinned and hung up.

As they left the railing and pushed their way back into the market itself a middle-aged man with red hair, a blonde woman and half a footy team's worth of sons in varying shades of gingery enthusiasm barrelled past them, all smiling and talking at once. The man waved an expansive arm that, given the press of the crowd, was bound to hit someone; it hit Merlin, whose mug, held precariously in two gloved fingers as he manouevred his mobile back into his pocket, hurtled out of his grasp and fell onto the hard stone underfoot.

"Damn it." Merlin glared at the sticky ceramic shards and then at the back of the man's head. "There's my deposit gone."

"It's only three pounds," Gwen said, patting his arm.

"It's the principle of it. I don't like paying for things if I don't have to."

Morgana laughed. The sound turned heads. "That's how you run the con, Merlin," she said. "Third-party sabotage. Though for it to be worthwhile, the deposit would need to be far greater than the value of the item, so you'd need to be running a quality scam concurrently --"

Merlin, rather nervous about Morgana's seeming obliviousness to just how noticeable a person she was even when she wasn't discussing criminal activity with cold-sparkling eyes, seized an oversized tam o'shanter from the nearest hat stall and jammed it onto her head.

"Sorry." She laughed again, but the spell of her musing was broken. She pushed the hat out of her eyes and posed in front of a scratched mirror. "I don't think it's my colour, do you, Gwen?"

Given that it was at least three shades of green, all of which were closer to lime-jelly vomit than to any kind of vegetation Merlin had ever seen, he agreed with Gwen when she said, "I don't think it's anyone's colour."

Morgana pulled it off and replaced it on the hat stand. "We're going to have stranger conversations before this is over, Merlin. I guarantee it."

"We're strange people," Gwen said, linking an arm through Morgana's. "Come on, let's go ice-skating."

***

**FLIGHT AF662**

**NOVEMBER 29th, 11:03am**

Morgana's boots, tall and with a bewildering array of buckles and laces, took three minutes to take off and probably twice that time to put on again, and the whole charade had to be repeated at every security checkpoint in the airport.

"This always happens," she sighed.

"Then why didn't you wear something easier to take off?" Merlin said, looking at his own stretched sneakers -- the laces of which he hadn't undone in months -- and Gwen's sensible flat shoes with no laces at all.

Both girls looked at him like he'd suggested making up a song about bombs and singing it within earshot of the security guards.

"Because these ones balance her belt," Gwen said slowly, as though it were obvious.

Merlin, who had already found himself in trouble for christening Morgana's obscenely large suitcase Franklin ("It's practically another whole person!" he'd protested, pointing at the damning digital readout of the electric luggage scales), decided not to push it. He was also slightly worried by the fact that Morgana had never flown Economy in her life.

"You could ask for a last-minute upgrade?" he suggested.

"Nonsense, Merlin." Morgana fastened the final buckle on her boots and stood up again; they were at what Merlin desperately hoped was the last security point, and a woman had already pulled Gwen aside for a 'routine check' and patted her down while the girl submitted to it good-naturedly and Morgana muttered about racism. "I wouldn't dream of sitting in a different section to you and Gwen. I'm sure it can't be that bad; I hardly ever drink the free champagne, anyway." And she wandered in the direction of the nearest Duty Free store, rolling her elegantly matching carryon luggage (Franklin, Jr.) behind her.

"Oh dear," Gwen murmured.

"It's only Edinburgh to Paris," Merlin said. "Maybe she'll consider it an adventure."

That fragile hope lasted Merlin until twenty seconds after they sat down, when Morgana discovered that not only was there no way she could extend her legs fully, the only things worth stealing were the headphones and the magazine, and they were free anyway.

"It's disgraceful," she said, yanking off her gloves.

"You get used to it," Merlin said.

Luckily, Gwen's sixth sense managed to locate a fashion article in the inflight magazine, and an indepth discussion of fur coats followed by a critical appraisal of the colours in Morgana's eyeshadow thingy managed to distract Morgana somewhat from the lack of legroom. It was becoming obvious to Merlin that when it came to clothes, Morgana was a wearer and Gwen was a sewer, and this seemed to be a recipe for firm friendship.

Before long the discussion turned back to vintage stores versus buying clothes new or somesuch thing. Merlin, whose mother had to bribe him into shopping trips with the promise of milkshakes and scones, found a station on the plane radio that played shamefully upbeat 80s pop, and left them to it.

***

**THE LOUVRE MUSEUM**

**PARIS, FRANCE**

**NOVEMBER 30th, 9:16am**

"Remind me of what this one does?"

"He'll be useful. Trust me." Gaius' tone brooked no argument.

"Okay, thanks." Merlin cast a glance around the room; it was the off-season, surely, but the Louvre was still packed wall-to-wall, and both of the girls were out of his line of sight. However, he wasn't too worred about losing them -- Gwen was wearing a coat in an eye-catching shade of orange, and Morgana's heels struck up a distinctive percussion as she strolled across the hard museum floor.

"There's no need to be snide, Merlin." Gaius coughed. "In addition to Lancelot's general skills, I have heard some reliable rumours about Arthur Pendragon that suggest the wisdom of having a handsome, charming young man on our team."

Merlin managed, heroically, not to laugh. "I. I see."

"I first met Hunith in Paris," Gaius said, startling Merlin by volunteering the information. "Did she ever tell you that story?"

"No." Merlin added it to the growing list of questions he had for his mother. "I didn't know she'd ever been here."

Gaius made one of his huffing sounds, sounding either non-committal or guilty, and Merlin took it to signify the end of the conversation.

Merlin had liked Prague and thought Edinburgh might grow on him if he spent some time there without being molested by the weather or pushed around by clumsy redheads, but he wasn't sure about Paris. It wasn't that Merlin felt any of the traditional anti-French sentiment, it was just that he hadn't been entirely convinced that Paris was a real _place_ until they walked out of the airport. As far as Merlin was concerned there was something almost unreal about the city -- Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, those curly little signs announcing the entrance to the Métro -- they were like things out of a story, frames from black-and-white films, icons emerging from the collective dreamwork of the human race.

As he was thinking, something happened in Merlin's peripheral vision that pinged his attention. It was pattern recognition, the same vague niggling in the back of his mind that he felt when the answer to a hacking problem was about to present itself to his consciousness after hours spent staring at a screen.

He looked in the appropriate direction, not sure what he was looking for, just looking. It was only the hours of training with Gaius that allowed him to see it, when it happened again: a young man with a black coat, a pale grey scarf and very French-looking hair murmured an apology as the tides of the crowd pushed him against a couple who were arguing over their museum map. They barely spared him a glance, and even though Merlin was watching intently he only just managed to see the effortless transfer of the man's wallet from his pocket to that of the thief. It was a beautiful pull, and Gaius' blanket approval made sudden sense: by his standards, it was obvious that this Lancelot fellow had a decent Essential Education in all the necessary things.

The grey scarf had been the agreed identifying feature in Lancelot's meticulously punctuated email, so Merlin felt confident that he wasn't approaching a strange and possibly violent pickpocket. He looked around for Gwen and Morgana and found them standing together in front of a piece of Art that, all things considered, wasn't much distinguishable from all the other Art. Merlin wandered up to stand next to them.

"Found him," he said. "Over near the painting of mountains."

Gwen peered around him. "The handsome one in the scarf?"

"I suppose," said Merlin, who'd mostly been watching Lancelot's hands and had only caught a brief glimpse of his profile. "Let's go."

They cut across the middle of the room, not walking too purposefully, until they were close enough that Merlin could tap the man's shouder.

"Hello? Hi. I'm Merlin Emrys."

And then Lancelot turned around, and Merlin had to admit that if there was any person on their team likely to succeed in a mission of gay criminal sexspionage...it was this one.

"Delighted to meet you. Lancelot DuLac." There was a surreal moment of cheek-kissing, after which the man smiled at Merlin in such a way that Merlin's sexuality -- which was not fluid so much as viscous: it could shift its focus, but only grudgingly, and only when quite a lot of force was applied -- started to shift around deep within him. Merlin shook his hand and was on the verge of thinking, _wow, this could be awkward_ , when Lancelot released his hand and moved on to kiss Morgana's cheeks without changing his expression in the slightest. Merlin exhaled, not sure if he was relieved or not.

Morgana handled herself well: she introduced herself smoothly, and did no more than exchange a bemused, pink-cheeked glance with Merlin once Lancelot let her go. Gwen, however, turned wide-eyed and prettily flustered in response to Lancelot's soft, "And you are...?"

"Guinevere," she stumbled. "Gwen. Call me Gwen."

" _Enchanté_ ," Lancelot murmured, his almost imperceptible accent kicking itself into overdrive. He didn't kiss her cheeks, which Merlin thought was probably for the best, but he bowed low over her hand and kissed that instead.

"Well, I feel redundant," Merlin whispered to Morgana. "Why don't we just get him to wander up to Uther and ask for the sword, very nicely?"

Morgana smiled. "You haven't met Uther."

"Uther hasn't met _Lancelot_ ," Merlin argued.

"Excuse us." Morgana pulled him back a step, nodding at a group of Japanese teenagers who were looking at their clipboards and talking a mile a minute. As the girls slipped through the gap in the crowd Morgana had created and went into the next room, one of them dropped something that looked like a pink frog.

"Oh," Lancelot said, tearing himself away from Gwen, "just one moment," and he bent down to pick up the purse. Then, to Merlin's astonishment, he hurried up to the girl and handed it back to her.

" _Mademoiselle_. You dropped this." Another bow. The girl in question, who was a good head smaller even than Gwen, gazed up at him adoringly.

"At the risk of asking an obvious question..." Morgana said, when he returned.

"You didn't want to keep it?" Merlin finished, when Lancelot showed no sign of finding the question obvious.

Lancelot transferred the politely blank look to Merlin. "But that would hardly have been an honourable thing to do."

"Er," said Merlin. "Well. I suppose not."

***

**EUROSTAR 9458**

**DECEMBER 1st, 11:03pm**

People had always made jokes about Merlin's body poking out at funny angles, but this was the first time he'd ever seriously wondered if his extremities were deficient in a minor but essential way. Either that or his blanket was too damn small, because bits of him kept escaping from the edges of it and letting in the air, which was just cool enough to be uncomfortable.

Merlin wriggled futilely for the millionth time and buried his head at a new angle in the lumpy blue pillow. He couldn't sleep; it was dark enough and the rocking of the train was pleasant enough, but he couldn't turn his brain off.

There'd been a minor misadventure due to the fact that the train's couchettes were numbered in some order that didn’t have anything to do with the nice, normal order of numbers, and they'd been half-settled in one compartment before being displaced by a group of harrassed Australian tourists who'd clearly travelled enough by European rail not to expect things like logic and numerical order.

But they'd found the right couchette and the right compartment eventually, wrestled Franklin onto the sturdiest of the luggage racks, and settled in for the night. It turned out that there really wasn't much to do in a sleeper train but...sleep. Once the bunks were unfolded, three on each side, there was nowhere to sit, and one could only stand in the centre if one was careful not to elbow anybody in the middle bunks.

Gwen had shifted around for a while on her top bunk but was currently buried in a book; Lancelot, below her in the other middle bunk, had fallen asleep immediately wearing earplugs, a satin travel blindfold and a deeply Zen expression. Morgana was in the bunk above Merlin's so he couldn't see her face, but this was probably for the best; he had no illusions as to just how unimpressed she would be with this sort of cattle-class transport.

Merlin wriggled a bit more and returned to his fond fantasy of murdering the other two people in their compartment, a couple who occupied both of the lowest bunks. They had taken up the floor with a seven-course picnic during which they spoonfed each other yoghurt and giggled inanely, after which the slurping sounds of food consumption were replaced by a whole new set of slurping sounds as they miraculously crammed themselves and their hormones into the tiny lower bunk directly below Merlin's. Now, however, they had mercifully separated and were fast asleep in their separate beds.

The night passed in a foggy mixture of half-dozes and wakefulness, with occasional stops at tiny lantern-lit platforms which Merlin could never be sure he hadn't dreamed into existence. By seven o'clock Merlin's blanket was doing its best to tie his legs in knots, but he ignored it in favour of resting his chin on his hands and watching the slow awakening of the world as they sped through it.

Lancelot's phone alarm set everyone to rolling and grumbling, and Merlin rubbed mercilessly at his own eyes as a long, slow groan emerged from above him.

"Morning, Morgana," he said.

Her next groan sounded like it was meant to be a scaffolding for words, but none were distinguishable. Merlin smiled. "We're almost there, I think."

At Venice Mestre there was a scurry to change trains; Merlin was groggy with fatigue and his thoughts only cohered when they were out in the early-morning air.

"Right," he said, staring at the tickets and trying to remember how to read. "The train number is one thirty-one."

It took ten minutes of staring at the click-click-click of the spinning numbers on the constantly updated departures board, followed by a rapid walk to the platform, but then they were on board the next train and Merlin was thinking about how nice it was to be able to sit up without whacking his head against a bunk. He was, however, not entirely sure which way the train should be going, and if that coincided with the way it was going.

He peered around worriedly as the station accelerated into a blur and then slipped away altogether. "Are you sure we're going south?"

"Don't care," Gwen mumbled, and two seconds later she was napping on Morgana's shoulder. Lancelot was doing something on his iPhone; Morgana was blinking blearily out the window and looking even less awake than Merlin felt.

"Sleep at all?" Merlin enquired.

"Not really." Morgana managed a smile. "You?"

"A little."

Merlin fully expected to doze off too, but the thin sunlight coming through the window and the grumbling of his stomach managed to push him even further towards wakefulness. After a while he gave up and took out his laptop, but instead of working he found himself staring out of the window, taking in the swiftly-moving, surprisingly picturesque view. The train kept being swallowed by tunnels and spat out again, into the snow and the sluggish hills with their tall, naked forests. It was a little like gliding through a black-and-white photograph, though not quite; there was a faint blueness to the mist and a faint redness to the bristling porcupine mass of trees, and those rivers large enough not to have frozen over cut roads of dirty glass-green through the snow.

Merlin blinked the scenery away and looked down at his computer for a while, concentrating on piecing together a few rough theories based on what little he knew about physical lockdown systems. He couldn't have been working for more than ten minutes when he happened to glance out of the window again as they emerged from yet another tunnel. To his surprise, all of the snow had vanished, leaving behind a landscape of dull browns and greens broken up by the houses scattered across it like birds, perched halfway up hills and nesting in the crannies of the shrugging earth.

One more meagre patch of snow and a few hours later, they were alighting at a small station. Merlin blinked through the cool noon light and there, bundled up in an enormous coat, was Gaius, looking at them with that wry smile and raised eyebrow. He was looking at Lancelot and Morgana's silent war of courtesy over who got to carry her bags; looking at the way Gwen was leaning against Merlin's side and yawning hugely, clearly not quite awake yet; and Merlin realised that he hadn't just been trekking around Europe for the sake of being polite.

He opened his mouth to call Gaius a sneaky devil, but then one of Gwen's yawns managed to itch its way into the hinge of his jaw, so he ended up doing that instead.

"Well," Gaius said. "Nothing to make one feel old like the fact that one's team has a combined age of approximately half an hour."

"Good to see you, Gaius." Lancelot, having lost the struggle to maintain hold of Morgana's bags, strode forward and did the cheek-kissing thing; Gaius brushed him away after a moment but, Merlin noticed, he was hiding a smile.

"All right, all right, the car's in this direction. We should be able to manage in one trip, though we may have to strap Lady Morgana's luggage to the roof."

" _Lady_ Morgana?" Gwen said, just as Merlin blurted, "You have a _title_?"

"Only a little one." Morgana shrugged. "I own some castles somewhere, too."

Merlin stared at her. "Then why -- why are you doing _this_?"

"For the same reason that you'll keep doing it, Merlin, even if your first job gets you enough money to set you up for years." She gave him a slow, brilliant smile and then tightened her grip on the Franklins and set off towards the platform exit. "Because it's the only game worth playing."


	3. Chapter 3

**SOMEWHERE IN ITALY**

**DECEMBER 7th, 7:02pm**

"Wait," Gwen said. "Go over that bit again."

"Lancelot!" Merlin called.

Gaius frowned. "I'm sorry, Gwen, which --"

"How do we get him to leave the house?" Gwen asked, frowning herself, glancing up at the whiteboard from where she was kneeling in the middle of the rug.

Lancelot twisted around, trying to meet Merlin's eyes without dislodging Gwen's tape measure from the outside of his leg. "Did you need me for something, Merlin?"

"Yes, I need some help with the Interpol servers --"

Gaius raised his voice. "I'll admit, I haven't quite determined --"

"No, nothing's wrong, I -- excuse me --" Morgana covered the mouthpiece of her phone and stood up. " _Quiet_ , please!"

The hubbub died down fast; Morgana's voice was an arrow of ice when she wanted it to be. In the sudden silence, the dull golden sound of the dinner bell rang out like a pointed suggestion.

Gwen leaned her forehead against Lancelot's leg and giggled. He looked down at her and smiled. "May I have my legs back, Guinevere?"

"Yes, I'm all done." She looped the measuring tape around her fingers.

Gaius heaved a sigh. "Thank God. No business talk over dinner. Morgana."

Morgana gave a frantic _this-is-important_ wave of one hand and disappeared into the room she was sharing with Gwen, still murmuring into the phone. Merlin gave his laptop a final, half-hearted death glare and then left it to sleep. His shoulders sprung into a bright network of aches as he stood up, and the faint warm smell of bread and rich sauce shot straight down into his stomach and set it to gurgling in anticipation.

"It's been a long day."

Gaius gave him the amused eyebrow. "Yes, it's almost like work, isn't it?"

"No sarcasm over dinner," Merlin said plaintively, and escaped to the dining room, following the smell. Adriana, Gaius's house- and groundskeeper, had taken one look at Merlin and immediately made it her life's mission to fatten him up by stuffing pasta into him until he felt ill. Not that Merlin could fault her cooking: it was simple, but amazing, full of obscenely fresh flavours and dark herbs, loud crusty bread and the bite of garlic. Lancelot had won Adriana's heart within two days by volunteering to weed the vegetable garden and by being the only person apart from Gaius who professed to like anchovies.

Merlin lowered himself into a chair and tugged a snugly wicker-wrapped bottle towards himself, glancing at the chill wind buffeting the trees outside the window with the lazy satisfaction of one who had spent the entire day inside a fire-warmed house. "Wine for anyone?"

"Here, please." Gwen passed her glass across the table.

"Bruschetta," Lancelot announced, placing a large saucepan on the table. Adriana chased him into his seat with a flick of her oven mitts.

"Sit! Sit, silly boy. Enough helping."

"Bruschetta," Gwen echoed blissfully, then raised her voice to a shout. "Morgana! If you don't hurry, we're going to eat your share."

Merlin laughed, enjoying the gentle slop of red wine as he poured his own glass. Adriana's bruschetta was a vat of slow-cooked tomatoes with caramelised onion and dark balsamic, spooned messily onto slices of garlic-smeared bread, and a bowl full of untidy strands of pasta laden with pesto.

Merlin waited with a growling stomach while Lancelot politely served everyone else; despite the informality of their meals, there was something about Lancelot that guilted you into good manners. So nobody touched their cutlery until Lancelot hooked the last strand of pasta onto his own plate, looked up with a small grin, and said, "Do begin, everyone."

Merlin applied himself solidly until his plate was empty bar crumbs and sauce-smears, rich tomato red and the golden-green of good olive oil mingling stark against the white crockery. "Gaius," he said then, chasing crumbs with a sticky finger, "No business, I know, but before I forget -- we don't know the format of Uther's security footage yet, so maybe Gwen should ask her father for -- Gaius? "

Gaius said something like, "Hmm," and Merlin turned to see what he was doing, which was watching Lancelot watching Gwen. There was a gentle, thirsty look on the young man's face that was very different to his normal unconscious seduction of the entire world, and Merlin thought: oh.

"Is it a problem?" he asked.

"It's a complication," said Gaius. "With any luck, we can prevent it from _becoming_ a problem."

So Merlin was not at all surprised when Gaius's pep talk that evening centred around Personal Entanglements and how they led to Dangerously Mixed Priorities and were all-in-all a terrible idea which should be, if not avoided altogether, at least put off until after a job was finished. Merlin listened attentively and pretended not to notice the slapstick manner in which Lancelot and Gwen took turns in sneaking longing looks at one another, always when the other person was looking away. It was quite sweet really. But Merlin had to agree with Gaius: it was probably a bad idea.

After the talk someone put a DVD on, but Merlin tuned it out and sorted through his email: an uncharacteristically brief missive from his mother, informing him that she was having a new oven installed and that she liked the ceramic earrings he'd sent her, and another from their employer:

_from: (address hidden)_  
 _to: boy.wizard@gmail.com_  
 _date: 7 December 2008 18:09_  
 _subject: continuing apace_

_\---_

_Greetings once again, young Wizard -_

_I sense that the workings of Fate have drawn you & your companions together at last. Remember that nothing is worth anything that is achieved in isolation. I have every confidence that the delicate balance of your gifts will lead us to triumph over our enemies._

_\- the Dragon_

\---

"What the bloody _hell_ ," Merlin grumbled.

***

**FLIGHT BA173**

**DECEMBER 18th, 5:00pm**

"First class is to the left, ma'am, if you'll just -- that's it, thank you --"

"Enjoy your flight, Morgana," Merlin called. Morgana lifted a hand and waved, then disappeared behind the dividing curtain, where she would presumably be offered complimentary champagne and oysters, and generally treated in the manner to which she was accustomed.

"Come on, Merlin, we're holding up traffic." Gwen took his hand and smiled, knowing. "Would you prefer she made loud comments about the falling standards of public transport all the way to London?"

"Down here, and your seats are just to the left. Have a lovely flight."

"I'm sure we will." Lancelot bestowed a sprinkling of bows and warm glances upon the cabin crew and led the way down the narrow aisle. "At least we're all sitting together. Here we are, row nineteen -- Guinevere, you must take the window seat, of course.'

"Oh, no, I'm exhausted," Gwen protested, "I'll just sleep, it'll be wasted on me, really."

"I insist." Lancelot planted his feet in the aisle and gave the impression that he was prepared to stand there politely until Judgement Day if necessary. Gwen eyed the arrested line of people behind them and quickly sat down. Merlin slid in next to her, and Lancelot took the aisle seat with a dazzling smile of apology that silenced the man who had been waiting to move past them.

Lancelot, Merlin knew, was going to be very handy to have around. Though he had no idea how the man ever did anything by stealth; he _stood out_ , so much so that by the time they were in the air and the plane had levelled out Merlin was witnessing an occurrence that he'd been convinced only happened in movies: all the flight attendents started falling over themselves to be the one to give Lancelot the best possible service. Merlin was so entertained that he considered waking Gwen so that she could watch; she, true to her word, had fallen asleep against the window almost immediately.

The battle came down to a silent, vicious argument between an improbably tall redheaded woman and an even more improbably handsome man; the woman -- Shalott, her name badge proclaimed -- won by rolling the drink trolley over the man's foot, and glided up to their row of seats with a triumphant smile.

"Hello, and what's _your_ name?"

"Lancelot." He gave the little bow again. "Delighted to met you, Shalott."

"Lancelot. What a fascinating name," she purred, which Merlin thought was a bit rich coming from someone who was only one misplaced double consonant away from being a type of vegetable. "What can I get you, gentlemen?" Her smile slid from triumphant to flirtatious, eyes still fixed on Lancelot.

"I'll have a mineral water, please." Lancelot met her smile with one that was just as flirtatious, but -- and this was the key point, as far as Merlin could tell -- no different to any of the other everyday smiles Merlin had seen on his face. That was just _how he smiled._

The woman took it as encouragement and shifted her shoulders or did something with her ribs, Merlin wasn’t sure, but her breasts suddenly became a whole lot more pronounced. "Pretzels?" she enquired, breathily, as though it were code for unspeakably filthy acts. It probably was.

Merlin coughed. "I'd like some apple juice."

The brief look Shalott gave Merlin said, very clearly, that as far as she was concerned he was no more than an irritating obstacle standing between her and her ambition to ravish Lancelot in the plane toilets.

Then she poured him orange juice instead of apple, and trundled the trolley backwards with a final, " _Anything_ I can do for you, anything at all, you just let me know," at Lancelot.

"I hate redheads," Merlin proclaimed.

"Based on one person?"

"It's not just her! In Edinburgh, there was -- I dropped my mug -- never mind. They're out to get me," Merlin finished darkly, and tried to sulk through all three episodes of _Top Gear_ that were available on the inflight entertainment. Though it was admittedly difficult to sulk with Lancelot sitting next to him providing gravely hilarious commentary on the cars and charming Hateful Shalott into bringing an endless supply of lemonade for Merlin and sparkling mineral water for himself.

Gaius had gone ahead of them a few days earlier, leaving them with strict instructions not to break anything in his villa and to make sure nobody called him before they arrived in London unless it was a dire emergency. Merlin wasn't sure if he just wanted some time free of twenty-somethings or if he was laying groundwork; Gaius, he was starting to suspect, was thoroughly enjoying the piecemeal clues and snippets of advice he fed his team.

It felt strange to be returning to England, to be going home in only the larger sense. A part of Merlin, a small unprofessional part tucked away with his purple woollen socks and and the watch that he'd broken in Paris, felt as though it had been deprived of some rare essential; something like sleep, or iron, or air. It was a dull thirst that wouldn't be quenched until he was sitting at his own kitchen table listening to his mother tell him to _shut that damn computer and talk to me while you eat, Merlin Emrys, or you'll be washing up every meal for the rest of the week_. Gwen was used to moving continents, Morgana had spent almost half her life at boarding school, and from what Merlin had managed to coax out of Lancelot, he was pretty sure there had been a few foster families involved there. But Merlin had grown up in his unremarkable town with his friends and his mother and the deep, subtle, reciprocal roots that a person can lay down in their home soil; that a place and a life can lay down, in turn, in a person's soul.

On the tiny screen, Jeremy Clarkson was saying something insulting about some car that might or might not have been an Audi. Merlin took a sip of his lukewarm lemonade and grinned around the rim of the plastic cup, imagining Will's voice in his head, firmly revoking his Y chromosome.

"Glad to be back in England?" Gwen was finally awake. She laid one hand on top of his, which was hogging the armrest between their seats, and used the other to stifle a yawn.

Merlin tugged his headphones off. "Yes," he decided.

***

**CENTRAL ARCADE, COVENT GARDEN**

**LONDON, ENGLAND**

**DECEMBER 21st, 2:12pm**

"I can't believe it still isn't Christmas."

Lancelot straightened up from peering at jewellery and raised his eyebrows in Merlin's direction. "How do you mean?"

"The Christmas markets, Prague, Edinburgh -- that was almost a month ago. Now we're back in a big city and everything's _still_ tinsel and lights and enormous crowds of people looking for presents."

Lancelot laughed, and a shop assistant looked over as though she was considering abandoning her long queue of impatient customers in order to rush over and offer him any help he might require. Honestly, first Morgana and now this -- Merlin was sure there had never been a less inconspicuous group of thieves. "Including you, I might point out. Perhaps you should have bought more while we were still in Italy."

Of course, Lancelot was the kind of person to think ahead and finish all of his Christmas shopping by November. Merlin made a helpless face at two identically ugly teapots and slid them back onto their display. "I've never had Christmas away from Mum before. I wanted to get her something special, but I'm pants at choosing gifts. Always have been."

"Well, what kinds of colours does your mother usually wear?" Lancelot asked, adopting a thoughtful tone. Merlin saw at least five women between the ages of fourteen and forty leap to the same conclusion and cast jealous, reproachful glances in his direction, as though it were Merlin's fault that his not-actually boyfriend were -- well, his boyfriend. Except not actually.

"He's French," Merlin said loudly, to the nearest and most blatantly disappointed woman. " _French_."

Lancelot's brow furrowed. "I'm sorry?"

"Nothing. It's -- don’t worry. My mother." Merlin drew a blank. What _did_ she usually wear? "She likes green," he hazarded. "The coat she wears on really cold days is dark green."

"How about this?" Lancelot's swift talented hands dove into a nearby rack and emerged with a silk scarf in bright, inky shades of blue and green, bleeding into one another. Merlin didn't honestly know if his mother would like the pattern, but the fabric slid across his fingers like water, and it was certainly pretty enough, and if Merlin didn't set foot inside a shop for another decade it'd still be too long.

"Perfect." He huffed out a grateful breath. "I'm done, then. You?"

Lancelot nodded and held out his hand for the scarf again. "Let me get that; there's no point in both of us cluttering up the queue. You can pay me back tonight."

Gaius's enormous flat was in Bloomsbury, an easy walk away, for which Merlin was grateful. The cold was biting, though not bitter, and it closed itself over his body like water. The first time he'd gone out walking he'd forgotten to wear a hat, and had remembered just how stupid this was when he'd developed a dreadful headache, one that started in the tiny bones of his ears and then seemed to spread along his skull like white noise. Since then he'd done the sensible thing and worn a beanie every time; even Lancelot was wearing a woollen cap, though with ten times more fashionable aplomb then Merlin would ever be able to manage.

He'd been in London a few times before, mostly for school trips or to see a show with his mother, but this time felt different, and Merlin thought it was because he wasn't there to see anything in particular. He thought: the city doesn't care about agenda or appreciation, because it wears its history like a skin, never bothering to show it off. But to those simply moving within it, with a purpose entirely unrelated to the city itself, London was friendlier, tugging itself down from the lofty heights and deigning to become a context instead of an object. Merlin still wasn't quite comfortable with the size of the city, the awareness that it stretched out in every direction for longer than he wanted to think about. But Gaius had taught him the importance of blending into one's environment, and of all the places that Merlin had ever been, London was a perfect canvas for blending -- easy to dissolve and spread oneself watercolour-thin across the grey surfaces.

He wondered if other people felt cities like this, with their fingernails and their elbows and the soft interior surfaces of their lungs, breathing them in and metabolising their secrets and exhaling inadequate metaphors.

As they passed the British Museum, Merlin felt the dull buzz of his phone and managed to fumble it out of his pocket without having to remove his gloves. Opening the text message took a bit more finesse.

"Can I help you, Merlin?" Lancelot asked, half-smiling.

"I like my fingers unfrostbitten!" Merlin protested. "I need them for hacking! Oh, I've got it." He glanced at Will's message and felt his face break into a grin.

_a little bird told me ur back in merry england. had enough of those dirty foreign climes eh?_

"Good news?"

"Good friend," Merlin said, slipping the phone away. "Think I'll leave off replying until we're back in a finger-friendly temperature, though."

Two steps inside the flat's door, however, Merlin was distracted from the welcome onslaught of indoor heating by the fact that he'd narrowly missed tripping over a pile of cables. "Gwen!" he called. "I think I almost destroyed something important, here."

Gwen appeared in the hall with a pair of pliers in one hand and a thick manual in the other. "Sorry! I'll tidy it up, I just -- I was distracted. There's only so much we can do before we know the details of the house's internal servers, you know, Merlin, and I don't even know how you're going to be accessing them in the first place -- Morgana will probably need to go through one of the house's own computers, at least until you can find the wireless key -- I'm not suggesting that you _can't_ , or anything, you know I think you're brilliant, it's just --"

"Tea?" Lancelot had moved past Merlin; he touched her gently on the shoulder. "I bought some shortbread, as well."

"That would be lovely, thank you." Gwen beamed at him, her mess of a sentence forgotten.

Merlin put his shopping bag away in the room he was sharing with Lancelot, rescued a mug of Earl Grey from the kitchen before Gwen could corrupt it with sugar, and collapsed on the living room couch to text Will. His friend was clearly skulking in the storeroom or on a break from his job at the town's largest bookstore, because the replies came promptly.

_yeah, back in the land of hope and glory and last minute bloody shoppers._

_try working retail. i'll brain the next person to ask me where the twilight books are._

_bet you london's worse. be thankful._

_thankful, right, tis the season and all that. get me anything?_

_maybe if i paid someone else to do the shopping. what do u want?_

_u know me. easy to please. all I want for christmas is your mom._

Once he'd finished snorting a very painful gulp of tea out of his nose, Merlin composed a desperate capslocked message in which he threatened Will with excommunication from their friendship if he ever, ever traumatised Merlin with mental images of that nature ever again. He was saved from having to continue the exchange much longer by the sudden arrival of Gaius, Morgana in tow.

"Morgana," Merlin greeted her, eyeing the large bags in her hands with some trepidation. "Have I forgotten something? I thought you were staying at your own place."

Morgana dropped a breezy kiss in the vicinity of his cheek and set her bags down. Something black and silky slid out of the nearest one. "I am, but I needed to see Gwen."

Which turned out to mean that Morgana needed Gwen to see _her_ , or more precisely, her dresses.

"Normally I'd just wear any old thing, but it's _quite_ an important party, and it would be lovely to steal all the attention and have something to rub Arthur's face in," she was saying, as though antagonising the son of their mark was a perfectly logical idea. "Now, I've managed to cut it down to a shortlist of twelve, so I've brought those ones for you to look at."

Gwen nodded, already fingering the black silk with a delighted expression. Gaius looked as though he'd suddenly smelt something odd, or remembered something important, and made for the nearest door. "I'll be reading in my room," he said loudly. "Merlin, I thought we'd go for dinner at seven."

Merlin nodded helplessly, calculating the odds that he, too, could escape before Morgana --

"Merlin." She turned her widest smile onto him. "I would appreciate a variety of opinions."

"I, um, I really don't --"

"We'd be delighted." Lancelot perched himself on the edge of couch, hands on his knees, radiating attention. Merlin sank back into the cushions, thinking _French_ with a certain mental viciousness.

Many, many outfits later, Merlin had recovered his laptop and was tucked comfortably into a corner of the couch, composing an email to his mother's friend Ronald and looking up every now and again when Morgana entered the room. Somewhat to his horror, he'd started saying things like, _I think those shoes looked better with the other one, you know, the one with the -- skirt thing._

"Gaius!" Morgana gave a pleased exclamation; Merlin glanced over at the doorway.

"I thought you were waiting for dinner?"

"And I thought this circus would be finished by now," Gaius grumbled, but he put a fond hand on Morgana's shoulder as he passed her. "Merlin, you should be briefing Morgana on what she'll be doing at the Pendragons' Christmas party. We would like accessing the security system to be possible no matter _what_ she happens to be wearing."

"Misdirection, Gaius." Morgana smiled. "Distraction. Now: black or red?" She hoisted the two current forerunners and dangled them one from either hand.

Gaius gave her a considering, twinkling look. "Red."

"Are you -- really?" Morgana's hands tightened on both dresses. "I don't know, I think -- Gwen? -- I think I prefer the black."

"Imagine that," Gaius said, and Merlin stifled a laugh. "Now that we're all in agreement -- Merlin, if you please?"

"Right." Merlin wriggled more upright, caught Morgana's eye, and began to carefully explain what he needed her to do: Uther's security system was almost certainly a self-contained one, controlled by servers only accessible from the house's computer network, and Gwen was probably right: for him to get a sense of its structure, Morgana would have to find him the network details on Uther's own computer. He was hoping to talk her through it over the phone, for the most part. "But if you run into a protocol that…" He trailed off, becoming aware that Morgana's mouth was doing the thing it did when she was completely lost and trying to think of the best way to bluff her way out of it. "Um. Do I need to start again?"

"Honestly, Merlin," she said, staring at him, "it's like you're speaking another language."

"It's not hard," he said, helplessly. "This is the easy bit. I hope. I'd do it myself, but we won't have another distraction as good as this party; we have to take advantage of it, and you're the one with the invitation."

"I realise that." She sighed. "But --"

"I think," Gaius cut in, "that you're going to have to start work a little earlier than we'd planned, Merlin. Morgana?"

Morgana bit at her lower lip for a moment, thinking, and then gave a sharp nod. "The party. They'll need some external staff anyway; they usually do, for these things. Lance --"

"Best not," Lancelot said, shaking his head. "I might know --"

"Oh, of couse." Morgana waved a hand. "Gwen, sweetheart, I'm sorry to ask --"

Gwen looked dubious. "What would I have to do?"

***

**CAMELOT HOUSE**

**LONDON, ENGLAND**

**DECEMBER 24th, 7:42pm**

"Cheer up," Merlin said, folding back the cuffs of Gwen's black shirt. "Morgana's the one who has to make small talk with the enemy. We just have to get everyone drunk enough that they don't notice when I slip away and hack into the security system."

Gwen laughed. "So simple."

"I waited tables for three days once." Merlin cast a quick, reflexive look over the busy kitchen, but everyone else was far too busy to pay them any notice. "It wasn't that hard."

"Only three days?" Gwen raised an eyebrow and dimpled at him simultaneously, and Merlin grinned back. She knew him too well, already.

"There may have been an incident with soup on the third day."

"Oh, Merlin." She pulled her cuffs out of his hands, inspected them, and nodded. "Just don't draw any attention to yourself, and I'm sure everything will be fine."

"You! And you!" A drumstick of a man, tall and thin and impeccably bald, was pointing a sharp finger in their direction. "Drink trays, circulate. Any special orders, come back and they'll be made here."

Merlin's feet itched to snap to attention. "Yessir," he said brightly, and picked up the nearest tray of champagne flutes. Gwen did the same, shifting it to one hand with an easy balance that Merlin envied. "Have _you_ done this before?"

She blinked. "No? But it's quite simple, just find the best -- there --" Her free hand nudged his tray until Merlin felt less as though it was about to topple off. "Good luck!"

Moving from the kitchen to the rooms that contained the party itself was like suddenly being plunged underwater; the clangs and fast shouts melted away into unobtrusive jazz and the rise and fall of conversation. It was still early, so the rooms weren't crowded, but there was a reasonable number of small knots of people looking in need of a glass to wrap their hands around. He caught sight of Morgana and made a beeline for her.

Despite the fashion parade ordeal, Morgana had ended up taking Gwen on a shopping trip and coming back with an entirely new dress or seven. Tonight she was wearing a backless dress in a rich gold fabric that caught every light fitting and every glance. She winked at him as he proferred his tray, and hooked her fingers deftly around the stem of a flute.

"Thank you," she murmured.

Merlin held still while his tray was assaulted by the other people in the vicinity, and smiled. "Enjoy your evening."

"I'll do my best." She gave a tiny roll of her eyes and lifted the drink to her lips.

Next Merlin approached a group of young men, all of whom had the air of someone who was there under protest and was looking to get drunk as soon as possible.

"Champagne? Sorry there's only a couple left -- I'll fetch more. Or I can do special requests, if you'd like something else."

There was a general unslumping of shoulders under beautifully tailored shirts and suit jackets, and someone with a large nose and the plummiest accent Merlin had ever heard immediately ordered a gin and tonic, easy on the tonic, _one_ ice cube, with lemon instead of lime.

"Er," said Merlin.

"I'll have a Tom Collins."

"Red wine. Something decent, no cask rubbish."

"Uther wouldn't be serving anything out of a _cask_ , Rupert."

"Vodka tonic."

And so on. Merlin cursed himself for not having a notepad; luckily, he _did_ have a quick mind, and Gaius had drilled a memory for details into him. He absorbed all the drink orders, repeated them back to a series of impatient nods, and then made a run for the kitchens and reeled them all off to the harried young woman who was manning the bar.

"Long Island Iced Tea?" she demanded. "Really?"

Merlin shrugged apologetically and passed her the Coke. "He's clearly going for the highest possible density of alcohol."

"He? Jesus." She poured a shot of vodka and upended it into a tumbler with a vicious flick. "Remind me why I shouldn't take a swig from the nearest bottle?"

Merlin smiled, herding glasses onto his tray. "Can't help there, sorry."

By the time he stepped back out into the party itself, the noise was higher, the room's walls less visible, the amount of cologne and laughter thickening the air much more pronounced. Merlin sidestepped many pairs of high heels, made his way back to the group, and distributed the drinks. He was about to congratulate himself when someone wearing a dark red tie frowned down at his glass, then transferred the frown to Merlin.

"Look, this isn't right, I wanted it on the rocks."

Merlin, who considered it a minor miracle he'd even managed to remember all of the drinks correctly, was not in the mood to fight his way back to the bar just because one of these snobs had a fussy palate when it came to temperature. He conjured up a smile and a tone that aimed for politeness but, unfortunately, landed just the wrong side of patronising. "It's a cold night. Might even be better without ice."

The man -- well, he didn't look much older than Merlin himself -- took a firm step forward, and Merlin clutched at his tray so that he didn't step back, meaning that he found himself not very far at all from a pair of narrowed eyes and a pissy expression. "What did you say?"

Merlin heard Gwen's voice in his head, clear as day: _just don't draw any attention to yourself._

"So sorry," he said. "Would you like me to speak louder?"

Blond-and-pissy frowned and leaned even closer, clearly about to say something rude; Merlin decided that it was high time to step backwards, did so, and felt himself slip.

"Oh, bugger," he had time to say, before his body abandoned its centre of gravity. The tray, still half-full of renewed champagne flutes, spilled most of its contents onto Merlin himself, but a good portion of it landed on his aggressor, who made a sharp sound of surprise and dropped his own drink as well. Merlin felt a glow of satisfaction past the throbbing of his bruised tailbone and the sudden patchy chill of his shirt.

"You imbecile!"

"Sorry! I'm -- very sorry." Merlin bit down on his lower lip and stood up gingerly, trying not to put his hands or knees in any broken glass. Most of the people in the room were staring at them.

"Goodness me." He'd never been happier to hear Morgana's voice. She materialised at his elbow, radiating a regal concern. "It appears that one _can_ polish one's floors to excess. Endangering the help and then shouting in their face -- really, it's hardly gentlemanly, is it?"

"Morgana," said blond-and-pissy, sounding unimpressed.

"Arthur," said Morgana.

"Gnfdkjsf?" said Merlin.

Arthur Pendragon -- _fuck_ , Merlin chanted internally, _fuck fuck fuck_ \-- swiped at his sodden shirt with one hand, and his scowl became even more petulant. "Ugh. Fetch me some paper napkins or something, you clumsy dolt, don't just _stand_ there."

"I'll give him a hand," Morgana broke in, seamlessly. "And I'll find someone to sweep up the glass."

"I still need a _drink_ ," Pendragon snapped. "Vodka tonic, with ice."

"Right away!" Gwen, who'd also managed to arrive on the scene, spoke up. She spun on her heel and headed towards the kitchen while Merlin bent down to his tray and kicked a few jagged bits of glass onto it.

"I think you've cut your hand," Morgana said, as she walked Merlin back to the kitchen. Merlin peered at his hands.

"I haven't --"

"No, I really think you have."

"Oh."

She smiled. "I think you'd better go and find something to clean the cut, don't you?"

Merlin handed her the tray and lowered his voice even further. "Uther's office -- upstairs and along the first corridor to the left, right?"

"That's right. You'll do just fine, Merlin. Here." She pressed something into his hand; it was her lipstick. Her blood-red lips smiled at him one last time, and shen she left him, calling for napkins in a bored voice.

Merlin took a deep breath and told himself to look as though he had every right to be where he was. He slipped into the bathrooms first, and carefully applied lipstick to a wad of toilet paper which he then clenched in his left hand, making sure that there was a fair amount of red showing. Then, still radiating casual confidence the best he could, he drifted -- with a few artistic winces -- towards the main flight of stairs. Time for the Boy Wizard to work his magic.

***

**TRAFALGAR SQUARE**

**LONDON, ENGLAND**

**DECEMBER 31st, 11:02pm**

Merlin was still thinking about the sign stuck on the lamppost: BEWARE, ANTI-CLIMB PAINT.

"It just seems so absurd."

"Welcome to the big smoke, country boy," said Morgana. "Never underestimate the lengths people will go to in order to have a better view than the rest of the crowd."

Trafalgar Square was, indeed, filling up in earnest, and Merlin tightened his grip on the railing. They were on the gallery side of the Square, high up; their vantage point was unfortunately located directly on an apex of the square of giant screens that dominated the open space, but it did allow a rare glimpse, through the buildings, of the London Eye in all its neon glory. And because of the railing, there was nobody standing in front of them; just a sheer drop to the stairs.

The sky was so pale, Merlin marvelled. Used to his own small town, and having just spent weeks at Gaius's villa, far from any large cities, he was still enchanted by the way the city never quite seemed to surrender to the night, clinging instead to its conglomeration of tiny light sources -- and _this_ , this was something else entirely. The screens blasted images to every compass point, and there were large lights rigged around the Square, illuminating the crowd with a patchy glow.

Merlin was feeling amiable and excited and just-warm-enough on the strength of the champagne he'd drunk before leaving the flat. He was rugged up and among friends and this was a transition, one of the most basic transitions, and he was happy.

Gwen dug her elbow softly into his side. "New year, new job. It seems fitting."

Merlin laughed. "Yes, my illustrious new job in the household of the person I'm trying to rob, and the person who hates me for spilling things all over his stupid shirt. I can't wait."

"Don't be such an ingrate," said Morgana, her tone mocking. "You know I called in every favour Uther owed me in order to get this job for the son of one of _my poor dear mother's friends_. I had to become very emotional during a long-distance phone call."

"You enjoyed every second of it," said Gwen.

"I did," she agreed. "Though I never thought Merlin would go out of his way to --"

"Enough!" Merlin moaned, removing his hands from the icy railing and tucking them deep into the pockets of his down jacket. "I know! Yes, yes, my clumsiness has already put me on the wrong side of Uther's son. But, in my defence, he's an idiot."

"True," said Morgana calmly. "Happy New Year, everyone -- I'll be in touch."

She waved as she worked her way backwards, towards the imposing and slightly eerie facade of the National Gallery; she was meeting friends closer to the river, though how she was going to find them was anyone's guess. They'd all headed towards one of the designated viewing areas close to Parliament, earlier in the evening, only to be met by a press of disappointed people coming in the opposite direction. There was a single brilliant undesignated spot somewhere near Embankment that afforded a view straight across the Thames, the Eye fitting neatly into the close horizon at the end of the panorama. The crowd of hopefuls filling the street at this spot had already created a traffic hazard by the time they'd given up and decided to stick with the Square; they'd had to fight their way through.

A little after that, Lancelot departed -- "On a quest!" he declared -- in search of anywhere at all selling hot drinks. Merlin didn't know how much luck he'd have; the last open cafés that they'd seen had been in the West End.

"We should have brought a thermos," said Gwen. Her nose was pink, and she kept burrowing deeper into the soft collar of the coat that Morgana had bought her for Christmas.

"Next time," said Merlin, without thinking. He turned and smiled down at her. "Do you think I just jinxed something?"

"I believe in us." She broke off to give a warning glance at the group of teenagers next to them, who were starting to diffuse hopefully into the small space vacated by Lancelot. "You managed to find the wireless key just fine, didn't you?"

Merlin nodded. There had been something altogether exhilarating about sitting crouched down with his back against the heavy wood of the desk leg and his feet in the thick carpet of Uther's study, letting the patterns unfold themselves beneath his fingers and etch themselves into his mental map, listening to his racing heart and the taut silence of the room. He'd been expecting a disaster, if only a minor one, but everything had gone smoothly. He hoped it was a good omen and not the calm before the deluge.

"That was quick thinking on Morgana's part, with the lipstick," he said. "Apparently my injury was almost bad enough to need stitches, and Uther's pleased that I didn't back out of the permanent position or try to sue Arthur or anything ridiculous like that."

Gwen laughed. "Lawyers."

"Feels odd that I haven't even seen this sword yet," Merlin said. "Though I doubt it'll look like anything worth this much fuss and money."

"Gaius thinks it's not about the sword, though?"

He nodded. "Revenge for something Uther did to the Dragon. And something about the sword not actually belonging to Uther in the first place -- I don't know, we're just the grunts, aren't we?" He smiled. "We're not paid to ask questions."

"Excuse me -- excuse me -- thank you --"

"That was quick!" Gwen hurried to take two of the cups from Lancelot's hands as he edged his way back through the now-dense crowd behind them. "How did you manage that?"

"Someone pointed me towards a stall two streets away."

The hot chocolate was lukewarm at best, but it was sweet and surprisingly creamy. They huddled together and exclaimed every so often at the still-increasing number of people, and watched the Eye shift from purple to blue to green, and Merlin got a few exuberant and poorly-spelled text messages from Will, who was clearly out drinking with some of their mates.

_standing next tp somoene to snog? whatabout that gwenn gjrl?_

As Merlin was standing there trying to think of a clever reply, the screens started the countdown, and the crowd began to yell along gleefully, a second or two behind. The soft, icy wind slid across Merlin's face and he fixed his eyes on the sky.

The communal 'Happy New Year!' sounded nothing like coherent words, but nobody cared. The first batch of fireworks streaked down above them in fingers of red and gold, many-layered arms slid around warmly-dressed bodies, and groups of people started to wave their arms and cheer.

Lancelot gave Merlin a look before leaning down and kissing Gwen -- well, it wasn't quite on the mouth, but it wasn't quite her cheek either. Gwen smiled at him with such sudden, honest happiness that Merlin felt a bit of a prick and looked at the fireworks again, to give them some privacy. What the hell. It was New Year's Eve -- New Year's Day, now.

Midnight and the sky was lightening even further, each explosion leaving an afterthought of smoke behind, each soaring collection of colour more wide-reaching and more overlapping. Merlin wasn't sure if this was something that you were supposed to wish on, like birthday candles and shooting stars, but it was probably the closest thing he was going to get. So he closed his eyes, watched the afterglow of bursting light against the backdrop of his eyelids, and wished one wish as hard as he could:

_Don't let me fuck this up._


	4. Chapter 4

**CAMELOT HOUSE**

**JANUARY 1st, 8:49am**  
  
Everything was going to be fine, Merlin told himself, if he could get through the first day without forgetting to wince. He'd made the bandage extra-bulky, and then Lancelot had done something thin and French with his lips and removed the whole thing and started over.

"The best prop is a subtle prop," he'd lectured.

"The Pendragons don't strike me as very subtle people," Merlin had said, but he trusted that Lancelot knew a lot more about this stuff than he did, so he'd complied.

"And what are these?" Lancelot had held up a set of keys and jingled them, and Merlin had stared at him blankly until he'd caught sight of his own keyring (some godawful green plastic thing that Will had extracted from a Christmas cracker and mailed to him; Merlin had immediately attached it to his keys and sent his best friend a whole series of fuck-you-too photographs of the mass-produced monstrosity).

"Oy." He hadn't been surprised, though: Lancelot was a much better pickpocket than any of the others ever would be.

"Not on the first day," Lancelot had said.

So now Merlin was standing on the doorstep of Camelot House, rocking back and forth on his feet and glaring at the door. In between flirting with half of London and helping Merlin fake a laceration, Morgana had gotten hold of Arthur's keys at the Christmas Eve party and imprinted them. Merlin had a full set, but Lancelot was probably right: best to settle in for a while, gather some first impressions, instead of risking everything falling down around his head when they'd barely begun the caper.

The fact that his mind even landed on the word 'caper', Merlin considered sourly, was proof that his mother had completely ruined him for all normal society.

"Emrys."

Merlin blinked as the door swung open to reveal the tall man who'd been organising the service staff at the Christmas party.

"Yes, that's me."

"Andrews," the man said, not changing expression. "I run the house, and you report to me. You're not too badly incapacitated, I hope?" Not only did he look like a drumstick, he had a voice like someone tapping their fingers against a steel drum.

"Er," said Merlin, distracted, then caught Andrews's impatient glance at his hand. "Oh, no, it's not a bother."

"Good. This way."

Merlin scurried after him and was given an efficient tour: living areas (huge), bedrooms (also huge), laundry (humid), bathrooms (many), studies (already familiar), and private art and antiques collection (ah- _hah_ ). Andrews swept him through the rooms at a pace that meant Merlin barely had time to note the positions of the most obvious security cameras, and while he saw a promising glint of metal from a case in the corner of one room, he didn't clap eyes on the sword itself. Time enough for that later, he supposed.

The end of the tour left Merlin in the kitchens (loud). The woman who'd been making cocktails at the Christmas party was called Georgia, and she was banging metal bowls around so Merlin assumed she had something to do with food.

"Honestly, I'm not sure why you were hired," was the first thing she said. Merlin decided not to go into the saga of emotional blackmail and Morgana's poor dead mother. "But," Georgia went on, "I suppose another pair of hands can't go amiss. Can you cook?"

"No," said Merlin firmly. "Sorry. Cleaning, though, I'm your man." Cleaning meant room access. And it wasn't like he _could_ cook.

"You'll spend some time washing dishes," Georgia said. "But there won't be much until tonight. Uther's working from home but he's probably having lunch out."

"Isn't the rest of the family in?" Merlin tried to sound casual. A house empty of Pendragons was a promising start.

"Arthur? Yeah, he doesn't have classes at the moment, but he'll just come and grab a sandwich. He's not one for formal sit-down meals unless his father's around to insist."

This didn't quite fit with the impression that Merlin had received of the Pendragon heir, but he'd seen the family dining room and he could imagine that sitting down to eat three times a day at the long, severe wooden table, surrounded by portraits of uncomfortable-looking people, could wear thin pretty quickly for even the most determined snob.

"The house seems like it should have more people in it," he said, pulling his arms back from the bench so that Georgia could flour it. She'd pulled a bowl of pale, risen dough from somewhere and was in kneading mode; Merlin had never seen someone actually make bread before. Even his mother, who had a deep mistrust of anything that wasn't prepared from scratch, bought her bread from the bakery. "A big family with heaps of kids. All that space is good for throwing parties, though, I guess."

"I'm so pleased it meets with your approval," said Arthur Pendragon.

Merlin wondered if there was a god of hackers and con artists, and if so, if he'd accidentally done something to offend the deity.

"Good morning," he managed, and, "sir," for good measure.

Twitchy distaste narrowly defeated smugness on Arthur's face. "No need for that."

"I thought it'd be better to overcompensate," said Merlin, "considering..." He waved a hand up and down, taking in Arthur's striped polo shirt, and conveying -- he hoped -- the entire champagne debacle.

"Oh, you're _that_ waiter, are you?" said Arthur, not quite convincingly. His eyes flicked down to Merlin's bandaged hand, then back up.

"Merlin Emrys," said Merlin. "I'll be working here for a while."

There was a pause. Merlin prayed for a cleaning emergency. He still wasn't sure about using his real name, but Gaius and Lancelot had tag-teamed the explanation and Merlin had been so exhausted by the end of it that he'd have called himself anything they wanted.

"About Christmas," Arthur said finally. "I'd had a -- well, a bad day. And I hate those parties, anyway."

"Are you -- are you apologising?"

Arthur's face went kind of pinched and annoyed. "My father always needs to make everything so...obvious."

"Ostentatious?" said Merlin's mouth.

"Exactly." Arthur frowned. "So."

"So you were in a bad mood," Merlin prompted.

"Nice to see you've been paying attention, Merlin," said Arthur, and turned on his heel.

"Oh," Merlin said, a few seconds later. "That _was_ the apology."

Georgia smiled at him for the first time. She had flour up to her elbows and dusted across one cheek. "If you think that was bad, you should hear his father."

Merlin, however, had decided to put some effort into avoiding Uther Pendragon. It worked right up until he was painstakingly removing a lot of fiddly ornaments from a glossy wooden shelf, in order to to dust said shelf, and heard Uther's voice drifting into his ears. He froze, stupidly, and then had to force himself to keep on with the task. Cleaning. He was just cleaning. By no stretch of the imagination was that illegal.

"-- push it up to noon?" Uther was saying. Merlin could only hear one set of footsteps; he was on the phone, then. "That's more convenient. Mm. No, I was going to ask _you_ if you'd read about the theft. Mordred. What sort of a bloody name is -- oh, I appreciate that he must be good, not just anybody could -- yes, I know."

Hearing Uther's footsteps pass the open doorway, Merlin quickly picked up some tiny ceramic ducks and transferred them to the tray with the rest of the ornaments.

"You're the new servant?"

After two more seconds of silent dusting, Merlin realised that this was not a continuation of the phone conversation, but was in fact directed at him. He turned, duster clutched protectively in front of his chest.

"Yes. Emrys, sir."

Uther's look said very clearly that he had more important things to do than worry about making his employees feel warm and welcome. "Tell Andrews that my lunch with Eliot Pompey has been moved up an hour and I'll need the car at half-past eleven instead."

"Right," said Merlin, and came perilously close to saluting with the duster.

"Very good," said Andrews, when this news was delivered. His face didn't move. Merlin wondered if confused pigeons ever tried to shit on the man's head when he left the house. _If_ he left the house. Maybe he slept upright in a broom cupboard and would perish with the house when it -- sank.

"That's ships," Merlin muttered to himself.

Andrews gave a twitch of his eyebrows that suggested to Merlin that maybe some instructions had been conveyed to him while his brain had been elsewhere.

"Certainly?" he tried.

"Follow me, Emrys," percussed Andrews, and Merlin scurried after him.

"Eliot Pompey?" he enquired of Georgia, later. Georgia, Merlin was fairly sure, was a Source to be Cultivated.

Sure enough, she gave a wise nod. "An antiques dealer. They met at a gallery opening at the end of November last year, and Uther spent half of last month on the phone to the man. I think he's planning to have some of his pieces valued."

"I haven't seen any of the art yet," Merlin said. "D'you think they'd mind if I had a quick look?"

Uther's collection was spread over two large rooms: paintings on the walls, none of them spectacular in Merlin's uncultured view, and various objects in glass cases. Merlin spent some time looking -- first as a cover and then in genuine interest -- at a collection of brassy instruments that looked as though they might have something to do with navigation. He carefully didn't look at the security cameras as he wandered from piece to piece, and fought to keep his expression neutral when he made it to the sword. Excalibur was larger than he'd imagined, and the blade was wider, polished and flawless, deadly. It didn't look old, but it also didn't look like something made just for display.

Merlin slipped both hands into his pockets and stepped closer, leaning over the case. It seemed an age before the soft beep sounded and he could straighten up, heart pounding, and move on to gazing at a canvas like a warzone, ravaged by shades of brown and grey and with bits of newspaper incorporated into the whole. It was a lot messier and more modern-looking than anything else in the collection, but somehow more likeable for it, Merlin decided, proud that he'd almost managed to have an opinion. He would have made a terrible art thief. Morgana and Lancelot talked about famous art heists with respect for the professionals involved, yes, but also with a respect for the beauty and the history of the object.

"I like that one too," said the voice of Arthur Pendragon, from behind him. "It's not my favourite, but I like it."

Merlin turned. Arthur was standing with his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, easy, entitled, slotting into the room as though -- well, as though he owned it.

"Which is your favourite, then?" Merlin asked.

"That one." He came to stand next to Merlin and nodded at a small landscape, green and pastoral, pretty enough if you liked grass and pine trees. It resembled the modern piece only about as much as a hedgehog resembled a chair.

"Why?"

Arthur looked at him. Merlin was almost certain he was deciding whether or not to lie.

"He bought it because she liked it," he said. "Not because it's by anyone famous, or fashionable, or because he'd be able to boast about owning it, or just because it was expensive."

She. That'd be the late Mrs Pendragon, Arthur's mother. It struck Merlin for the first time that they had both of them lost a parent, at one stage or another. Merlin had wondered about his dad, sometimes wished that he was around just so he could meet him, see if he'd inherited his chin or his awful fashion sense from a real, imaginable, present human being. But he'd never felt _loss_. You have to have something, to lose it.

"Not that it wasn't, though," Arthur said. "Expensive."

Merlin rolled his eyes. Moment lost. "Of course it was."

"Are you trying to be _snide_?"

"Are you trying to be intimidating?"

Arthur's face gained a laughably transparent _and who are YOU to talk to ME that way_ expression. This was pointless. Merlin had what he needed, he should have walked out of the room and not stood around gawking at art and putting himself in danger of being cornered like this. But he existed so narrowly inside this house, close and muffled with secrets. He wasn't used to it.

He preferred this, the spark of honest interaction, even though he was fairly sure the spark was annoyance.

"I'm sure there are duties you could be fulfilling out of my line of sight," Arthur said finally. "In fact, take that as a general guideline. If I'm forced to speak to you on a daily basis it may drive me to insanity."

"Driving's hardly necessary," Merlin snapped. "I'd say you're within easy walking distance already."

Arthur's mouth opened slightly, and stayed open. The silence pressed down on them for a few terrible, awkward seconds, and then Arthur tipped his head back and laughed. There was a note of honest delight in it, and Arthur's hand squeezed Merlin's arm for a brief moment, and even when he stopped the laugh lingered around his mouth.

"You're impossible," Arthur said.

To his horror, Merlin felt that sluggish pool of potential desire in him just melt entirely, like honey in hot water, and flow straight down the path of least resistance. He looked at his arm, felt the tingle of warmth there and the insidious hum of Arthur's stupid laughter in his ears, and thought: _this is absolutely not what I need right now._

Not that it stopped him from obsessively replaying the conversation in his head as he walked back to Gaius's flat in the evening. He could deal with it. He'd had unwise crushes before, and managed to get through them with only the usual amount of soul-damaging embarrassment.

He'd just have to be more careful, and definitely spend less time gawking. At art. His sleepy libido was demanding a good few sessions of gawking at Arthur himself, just to make sure it wanted all the things it currently wanted, even though that would place him in direct contravention of Arthur's request to stay out of his line of sight. Unless it was covert gawking. He hadn't said anything about Merlin's line of --

"Did you press the wrong button?"

Merlin jerked his head around and managed a smile for Morgana as she walked toward him, a vision in shades of grey fur. His toes and the tip of his nose were freezing, he realised. God only knew how long he'd been standing like a moron in front of the intercom panel.

"I, uh. Lost in thought, I suppose."

"Are the Pendragons working you too hard? Do I need to make another concerned phone call?"

He laughed and pressed the button for Gaius's flat, and pushed the gate open when the buzzer sounded. "Better not have them thinking I'm some kind of weakling."

Morgana left him unlacing his shoes inside the entrance to the flat and floated into the living room, no doubt to present her gloves for Gwen's approval and flirt in her usual disinterested manner with Lancelot. Merlin inspected the damp toes of his socks, decided they'd dry off soon enough, and located Gaius in the kitchen. The man was putting together a tea tray of elaborate size and complexity, strainer and saucers and sugar biscuits and all.

"Uther met Eliot Pompey at the end of _November_?" Merlin said, in lieu of hello.

"Ah," said Gaius, setting the lid back on the sugar bowl.

"Is that what you were doing while we were in Edinburgh? I thought Eliot Pompey was a midgame figure, not his best mate."

"The timing was better this way," Gaius said calmly. "Don't make that face, Merlin, you look like you've swallowed a jar of horseradish cream."

"You --"

"Uther Pendragon has already employed Eliot Pompey to give a new valuation of several of his most prized pieces, for insurance purposes. Including the sword Excalibur."

"Yes? Yes!" Merlin did a little spin on the spot and immediately felt idiotic, but he was too excited to spend much time caring. "I got the ID code off it today, too. Well, I hope I did. The thing beeped."

Gaius nodded. "I think it's time to make sure everyone's on the same page. A hand, if you don't mind?"

Merlin picked up one of the laden trays and made his careful way out to the living room, managing to slosh no more than a small amount of milk over the side of the jug.

"Let's start with the microchip," said Gwen, when everyone had a cup. "Excalibur's RFID chip is automatically queried every five minutes by a remote reader. If can't read it, or if it's not giving off the expected GPS coordinates, that'll set off the security alarm. The chip is designed to be impossible to remove from the sword without destroying it, which would make it -- ta da! -- unable to be read."

"Here," said Merlin. He pulled the gadget, an invention of Gwen's father's, from his pocket and handed it to her. "I got close enough to the sword today for this to read the chip's ID code."

"And now Guinevere can create one that gives back the same code when queried," Lancelot said.

Gwen nodded. "Then, thanks to Eliot Pompey, we put the new chip on the sword and deactivate the old one. The difference being, _our_ chip will be removable. When we need it to be."

"Good," said Gaius. "Next?"

Gwen skimmed a half-eaten biscuit down a piece of paper full of scribbled notes. "The physical pressure sensor."

"We've been running some simulations, and I do not think we will be able to get around the sensor itself," said Lancelot. "This model is too delicate. The best approach would be to stop the computer system from sending the signal that would trigger the physical lockdown, but fool it into thinking that the lockdown is underway."

"Merlin?" Gaius said.

"I'll work on it," Merlin said.

"There's also the alarm sent to Uther's mobile phone at the removal of anything," said Gwen. "That's through a whole other path."

"The simplest solution is for me to steal the phone itself," said Lancelot.

"And I told you, I don't like it," said Gwen. "It puts you at too much risk. We're trying to avoid contact with Uther during the actual event."

Morgana leaned forward, frowning. "I agree. That's a lot riding on a single lift."

"I can do it," Lancelot insisted.

Everyone looked at Gaius, who took a deep sip of his tea and shrugged. "We'll leave it for now. Gwen, what's next?"

Gwen shot another look at Lancelot, half concern and half frustration, but she lifted her computer onto her lap and opened it. "The flashing lights."

"Ah, yes," Gaius said. "Gwen and I have been looking over the copy of the security feed that Merlin made during the Christmas party, and we've found something new."

Gwen turned the screen so that they could see the greyscale security feed of Camelot House's art rooms.

"The timestamp?" asked Morgana. "They're not too hard to replicate."

"It's not just that." Gwen peered down over the image and tapped her finger against a single spot. "Here. There's something that flashes, a tiny light. There's at least one of them in each angle."

As she spoke the picture jumped to a new view. It took Merlin only a few moments to locate the light in this one. "It's not regular," he said. "A code? Morse?"

"No, we can't find any patterns," said Gwen. "I talked to Dad about it; he's seen something like it before, he thinks it might be a safeguard."

Merlin made a face. "I don't like that word."

"You think the footage is automatically checked?" said Lancelot. "And the correct temporal pattern of flashes has to show up to prove that it hasn't been looped or duplicated?"

"That sounds unlikely," said Morgana.

"No," Merlin said slowly, "it's possible. The pattern could be related to the date and time through some sort of algorithm."

"I'll see what I can do with it," Gwen said. "Even so, we might need to think about alternatives to simple looping. Anyway, next is -- alibis."

"Covered," said Morgana. "Escape route?"

"Covered," said Merlin, and grinned.

***

**CAMELOT HOUSE**

**JANUARY 2nd, 9:03am**

"Christ," was Georgia's disgruntled greeting the next morning. "Anyone would think we were understaffed before this week."

"Sorry?"

"Another one." She jerked her head toward the open doors of the pantry. "Though this one _can_ cook, or at least take orders and chop things."

Merlin's mouth went dry. Unknown human elements were very low on the list of things they wanted to deal with. "Really?"

"Well, he claims so, but he's been fetching dried marjoram for almost a minute now. Are you lost?" she called.

"Just admiring the mustards," came the reply, and it was a very good thing that Georgia was frowning at the pantry and not looking at Merlin's face, because he would have had to try and pass it off as either a seizure or an unfortunate form of Tourette's.

"H- _hi_ ," came out of his mouth, once the unfortunately known human element had emerged from the pantry.

Thankfully, Georgia didn't pick up on the panic. "Merlin, this is -- do you want William, or Will?"

"Yeah, Will's fine, hi," said Will, in a completely blasé way that Merlin was sure he'd copied off someone on the telly. "Pleased to meetchoo, Mervin."

"Merlin," said Merlin. At least it was an excuse to glare at him. "So, I hear you can cook."

"A bit."

"Well, if you're free _right now_ , I could use a hand moving some furniture. So I can mop the floor. In another room."

"'Scuse us," said Will. He all but skipped at Merlin's heels as they hurried out. "Where's this furniture then?"

"Just over -- oh, I'm sorry, clumsy, _whoops_." Merlin slammed his friend against the nearest convenient piece of posh-beige wall and held him there, switching the glare back on. "My mother sent you here to spy on me, didn't she?"

"Yep," said Will cheerfully.

Which explained Will's otherwise inexplicable presence in the Pendragon household, really, because by now Merlin was convinced that between the two of them there was nothing that Gaius and his mother couldn't accomplish.

"You lied to that poor woman," Merlin said, releasing Will's shoulder. "I'm pretty sure you can't cook."

"You heard her." Will gave the kitchen door a good-natured leer. "I'm good at taking orders. Especially from a girl like that."

Bossy brunettes always had been Will's type, Merlin reflected. It was a good thing he hadn't met Morgana, he'd probably be -- wait.

"The rest of my team. You haven't met them yet, have you?"

"Only Gaius." Will grinned. "What a charmer _he_ is. D'you think he and your mum ever --"

Merlin leapt at him again, smothering fingers at the ready, but Will hopped sideways and contented himself with a waggle of the eyebrows. Merlin thought about the bucket and mop that were awaiting him upstairs and wished that he could apply some of those cleaning products to his brain.

"Come on then," he said. "You might as well be of some use."

Perhaps Will's presence wasn't a complete disaster, Merlin thought, sitting cross-legged on a table with fingers flying across his tablet, occasionally glancing up to give Will an encouraging wave. Will rolled his eyes and shook the mop in his general direction.

"You're not even working," Will accused. "You're playing Angry Birds. I'm wise to your tricks, Emrys."

Merlin was putting the finishing touches to a rough but rather elegant backdoor in the Pendragon's network system, through which he would be able to siphon off a lot of useful data, and couldn't spare enough brain cells to come up with something cutting in return. He poked his tongue out instead.

There was only so much work that could be accomplished in a day, however, as the watchful eye of Andrews ensured that it kept being interrupted by -- well, work. The housekeeper slash butler (slash drill sergeant, Will added) took immediate if perplexed advantage of the sudden expansion of the staff, and ordered a full, exhaustive cleaning of Camelot House and the high-walled, semi-manicured thing that passed for a garden in the middle of London. It was almost as large as Merlin's own garden at home, but lost out entirely when considered as a ratio of the size of the house, and it had a cramped, out-of-place air to it that filled Merlin with an odd feeling of pity. He liked gardens that ran amiably into the ones on either side, and inquisitive trees that drooped over fences.

The garden was much improved aesthetically in the late afternoon, when Arthur marched through the front door of the house, paused briefly in the kitchen, and proceeded to sprawl full-length on the grass, sucking hard enough at the tiny straw of a Ribena carton to give the thing an hourglass figure. He was still wrapped up in an enormous red muffler and a thick jacket, but other than that he looked for all the world as though he thought it was the middle of summer.

The madman in question glanced up from the textbook he'd flattened out under his cold-reddened nose and caught sight of Merlin, who was hovering unwisely near the door and trying to convince himself that yesterday's erotic epiphany had been a great big mistake brought on by extended proximity to Lancelot's hair.

"Oh, good," Arthur said. He lifted the now-empty Ribena and waggled it in the universal signal for _get me another one_ , and Merlin wondered what Arthur Pendragon _saw_ , when he looked at Merlin; if he was remembering the spilled champagne, if he had any real curiosity about the life of someone like Merlin who existed on the comfort-enhancing periphery of his own. If his cool, neutral blue eyes saw people as Merlin saw art, curious but uncomprehending, or as Merlin saw code: beautiful and engrossing and always worth the second glance.

It would be best for him not to think of Merlin at all, of course. The curiosity of others was poison to criminals.

It would be best.

Merlin knocked his forehead sulkily against the fridge a couple of times and fetched another carton of cordial. He suppressed his simultaneous urges to throw it at Arthur's head and to smile like a loon, choosing to drop it into the dull grass next to the textbook instead. It wasn't the coldest of winter days, but it was cold enough that just stepping outside for that simple task made Merlin's fingers feel pinched.

"Anything else?" he said, before he could think better of either his intended sarcasm or the fact that he'd just recited the opening lines to some sort of ludicrously classist porn film.

Arthur pulled the straw away from the carton with clumsy, gloved hands, and bit -- nggh -- the plastic sleeve off the straw. He took two whole sips, eyes on Merlin, before speaking.

"You're not very good at this servitude thing, are you, Merlin Emrys?"

"And to think when I was six, I _dreamed_ of fetching drinks for a living."

"As I said."

At six Arthur had probably been already embedded in some public school that tacitly encouraged its pupils to believe in the necessity of the serving classes. He'd probably worn tiny blue trousers and -- and learned _pratliness_ , why was Merlin even thinking about this?

"It's a job," Merlin said.

Arthur ran the fingers of one hand down the crevice of his book, flattening the spine. Merlin couldn't read the text, but it was dense and heavily footnoted. Arthur glanced down at it, and up again.

"It's a job," Arthur echoed. He didn't sound quite as amused any more.

"I'll just, um," said Merlin, "um," and escaped back inside before he could do anything silly like lean down and pat Arthur on the head like a morose puppy.

Then Merlin made busy noises in the laundry for a while and read the small print on the bottles of cleaning products until it was time to leave.

"So, Pendragon the Younger," said Will, once they'd left the house in different directions and reconvened two streets away. "There's a face to launch a thousand reality TV shows, am I right?"

"Can't say as I've noticed, really."

Will looked at him. Merlin's heart sank.

"I was going for offhand," he said glumly.

"Missed it by a mile, mate." Will's hand thumped down hard between his shoulderblades. Merlin winced. "Cheer up. Looks like I arrived just in time."

"Time for what?"

"For getting you well pissed, and rinsing all dangerous thoughts of blond snootiness out of your mind. You and me. Beer. Lots of."

Merlin grinned. "All heart, you are."

"It's what your dear mother would want," said Will. "C'mon, Emrys. Beer."

***

**POMPEY ANTIQUES, WEST KENSINGTON**

**JANUARY 10th, 9:50am**

_from: (address hidden)_  
 _to: boy.wizard@gmail.com_  
 _date: 10th January 2009 17:57_  
 _subject: progression_

_\---_

_Young Wizard -_

_Be on your guard! The gilded trappings of our enemy's lair conceal the ugliness of character that lies beneath. Be firm in your resolve. The sword must be released from its imprisonment._

_\- the Dragon_

\---

Despite what Hunith might or might not want, despite beer in what Will deemed pharmaceutical quantities -- followed by a ghastly morning of feeling like a throbbing wad of damp paper, and being booted out of first bed and then the apartment by an unsympathetic Gaius who wasn't going to have Merlin fired for being late to work -- Merlin was having trouble extricating Arthur Pendragon from his thoughts.

His first week in Camelot House had proceeded more or less as planned: uneventful, quiet, doing enough work to justify his presence and checking his phone every half hour to see if Gwen had a technical question or if Morgana had sent him another photo of the antiques shop they were rustling into being in order to solidify the character of Elliot Pompey.

Merlin was grateful for the presence of Will, who had a best friend's telepathic knack for sensing when Merlin's contemplation of security network keys had morphed into contemplation of the open-necked shirt that Arthur had been wearing on Wednesday morning, and the almost-smile he'd given Merlin as he swung his bag over one shoulder and left for the university library. At times like that, Merlin could count on being sprayed in the face with air freshener.

But it was no good. Arthur continued exactly as irritating and superior and offhandedly charming as ever, and just as much of a _bad idea_. It'd be alright if it was just Merlin's dick taking an interest -- he'd take Will's exasperatedly crude advice, have a few good wanks and move on -- but his brain was getting in on the act as well. Merlin was going to go ahead and blame the enormous house and Arthur's gorgeously tailored clothes, the general oppressive sense of _money_ , for the dream he'd started having: the dream where Merlin couldn't find his sneakers and became more and more stressed out by this fact until Arthur turned up with some beautiful leather shoes in a box and proceeded to slip them onto Merlin's feet, all the while telling him what an idiot he was for losing them in the first place. Sometimes Merlin was sitting on a piano. Sometimes the whole scenario took place on a spaceship. It was a dream, after all.

But the point was, Merlin was not going to be Pretty Womaned or Cinderellaed or what have you by some arrogant prat whose father he was currently trying to rob.

Absolutely not.

Besides, it was probably very un-PC of him to even be having those kinds of fantasies; just like the proper feminist thing to do was to assume that women didn't necessarily want anyone to protect them (and Merlin was indeed quite sure that if anyone tried to protect Morgana she would laugh in their face), being a man and having wafty candy-floss feelings about resting luxuriously in another man's strong arms was not doing anything to help Merlin's convictions that he was a standard-issue bloke who just happened to be a little bit gay sometimes. Mostly, it seemed, around Arthur. And Lancelot a bit. But there were probably inanimate objects that could be described as gay for Lancelot, so that didn't count.

" _Me_ rlin." Morgana let out a sigh that was a bit more dramatic than it really needed to be. "You've been rubbing the same spot for almost a minute."

Merlin took a step back and inspected the sparkling glass cabinet door. "Have you noticed I'm doing a lot of cleaning in this job? Nobody told me about all the cleaning."

"It's a time-honoured undercover role," Morgana said.

Which Merlin knew, obviously; janitors and waitstaff and dustmen were often as good as invisible to the kind of people who were rich enough to be worth conning, and he'd already been over the reasons why he had to remain as unremarkable as possible in Arthur's eyes. It was stupid to feel underappreciated and frustrated when the whole _point_ was to be taken as less interesting, less brilliant and capable than he truly was. But he did, even so.

"Time for you two to disappear," Gaius said. "Go and sit with Gwen."

Merlin cast a final glance around the antiques shop. It looked good, he supposed. Near the register, Lancelot was adjusting his cuffs and looking at himself sideways in one of the many old mirrors that hung on the walls. He had coloured contacts on behind trendy, dark-framed glasses, and his hair was curled; he'd walked around the apartment the previous evening in _actual curlers_ , like someone's grandmother would use. The trousers and shirt that Gwen had altered for him worked a subtle magic that thickened his figure, and he'd used a kind of putty to change the line of his jaw. As Merlin watched, Lancelot's facial muscles tightened and then loosened into a new expression, somewhere between fussy and disdainful, that completed the transformation. It was still Lancelot, but -- at the same time, it really wasn't.

"He is _very_ good," Morgana said, as she and Merlin stepped out of the showroom.

They bypassed the valuation room and Morgana rapped on a smaller door off the same corridor. "It's us."

Gwen pulled the door open. "Almost show time," she said. One of her hands was flickering near her leg in a silent jitter, but she looked more excited than nervous. She locked the door behind them once they were inside, then resumed her seat in front of the screen and pulled her headset on. Merlin and Morgana followed her lead.

One large screen like an enormous computer monitor was split into a central window surrounded by smaller ones. Half of these small boxes showed the showroom they had just left, with Lancelot and Gaius visible as they wandered around, and the other half gave multiple overlapping angles of the valuation room's interior, currently dim.

Gwen touched the box that showed Gaius, who was hovering near the shop's entrance, and flicked it into the centre so that its image expanded and filled the largest window, still crisply defined. She stroked a wheel on her controls and suddenly Merlin could hear, through his headset, the tread of feet and even a faint murmur of traffic from the street. One by one Gwen went through the camera feeds, moving so fast that Merlin could tell she'd already checked them all and was just doing it to fill in the time. Once it was back to the first view she let out a slow breath, and began worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.

"Here they are," said Gaius's voice.

All three of them sat more upright. On the screen, Gaius -- less physically altered, but still impressive in an impeccable suit -- pulled open the door and admitted four men and a woman. One of the men was Uther Pendragon. Two of the others were holding dark, heavy-looking cases, large enough to contain part of an orchestra's brass section.

"Eliot," Uther said, sounding nearly warm. He clasped Gaius's hand and didn't introduce the people behind him.

"Security," Morgana said softly, and lifted her own manicured hand to tap at the small window that showed the immediate street exterior. "There'll be more of them in that car. Uther doesn't take chances."

"Come this way, Uther," said Eliot Pompey, who sounded like a much posher and less grumpy version of Gaius. "I must say, I'm excited to finally get my hands on these pieces of yours."

Gwen let out an incredulous giggle. She adjusted the central screen as Gaius led Uther and his retinue to the back of the shop and then out through the same door that Merlin and Morgana had used. Lancelot, alone in the shop, picked up a broom and began to sweep near the entrance. Even in the small frame Merlin could tell that he was holding himself in the same way, not breaking character at all.

The view that Gwen eventually chose of the valuation room was that provided by a tiny camera attached to the ceiling light, positioned directly above the largest table. She fiddled with the zoom function while Uther and his security staff arranged themselves in the room; on the highest magnification, Merlin could see the velvety grain of the fabric spread out over the table.

"Where would you like to begin?" asked Gaius.

Uther gestured to one of the men, who handed over his case. Even zooming in closely and with a few quick window changes by Gwen, they couldn't see the combination Uther used to open the case; his hand covered the lock closely, by accident or design. Given what the Dragon and Gaius had said about Uther's paranoia, Merlin suspected that it was nothing more than habit.

"Damn," Merlin said. "That would've been useful."

Not because they had any intention of breaking into the transport cases, but because people were predictable. There was always overlap in PINs and passwords and chosen combinations, and knowing one of them could at least give a hint as to the number groups that made up the others. Lucky numbers. Memorable dates.

Merlin tried to pay attention for the first hour of slow appraisal and discussion of things that weren't swords at all: some ugly statuettes, two paintings, and a small mosaic that Uther handled with reverence. It was all very old and dull. Morgana was listening to Gaius's spiels with rapt attention, practically taking notes. For himself, Merlin was ashamed but not at all surprised by the way his brain took the opportunity to return, like a slow sly compass, to a partially constructed daydream about meeting Arthur in a Starbucks, in a parallel existence.

Arthur would be wearing his grey coat with the collar that brushes his jaw, and he'd glance over Merlin's shoulder and be impressed by the lines of code on his tablet, and he'd ask if he could sit down and they'd chat about uni and eat lots of pastries. Nobody would spill anything onto anyone else, nobody would be insufferable, and nobody would be committing criminal acts.

And then -- "Ah, I believe you mentioned this one," Gaius was saying, and Uther was pulling something long and unwieldy out of the case and there it was, Excalibur, seeming a lot larger than it had under the glass. Temporarily released from its imprisonment, as it were.

Merlin exhaled, slow and steady, staring at the sword.

"We've _got_ it," he said. "I can't believe we're just going to hand it back."

Morgana patted his shoulder. "Patience, Merlin. There's no point in ruining a perfectly good escape route."

"True." Merlin glanced over at her. "Uther was talking about Mordred, the jewel thief. Read about him in the papers."

"Sometimes I think it might be nice to be notorious," she sighed.

"Shh," said Gwen.

Gaius had the sword in his gloved hands and was tilting it, turning it, examining it minutely, but also exposing it via the camera to Gwen's just-as-thorough examination. There was a furrow of concentration between her eyes as they swept the image, magnified until it was barely recognisable as a sword at all.

"Got it." Her finger flew to tap the screen, and she adjusted the channel of her mike so that Gaius's earbud would pick up her voice. "Got it. Uppermost side, about an inch above where the hilt meets the blade."

"Beautiful work," Gaius said, and turned the sword over one more time before setting it down on the cloth so that he could reach for a magnifier. "I'm going to take a closer look at the design."

This was it. Merlin's heartbeat crept into his ears and he found he was leaning forward in his seat. Gaius had rehearsed this for hours, sitting alone at the table and drinking his way grimly through multiple cups of coffee, until the sleight of hand was casual and all but invisible even if you were looking for it.

The hand magnifier with its thick handle was a construction of Gwen's, containing a fiendish little piece of technology that her father had shipped to them from Prague. When brought into close proximity of the RFID chip, it would render the chip useless; dead. Then Gaius would have to move the magnifier away and attach their own, modified version of the chip to the sword, and Gwen would activate it with a remote signal.

Not only was Gaius doing all of this directly beneath Uther's gaze, there was an additional element that skated close to gambling: the chip was queried every five minutes, and the exact timing was unknown. Merlin had offered to locate and hack the central servers of the security agency in order to find out, but Gaius had vetoed that as absurdly risky for the slim benefit it could provide, given that it would also require a physical break-in at a place of business that was quite literally _all about security._

Deactivating one chip and then transferring and activating the new one should be the work of seconds. Merlin had already calculated the ridiculous odds that a security query would occur during the miniscule amount of downtime, but even the solidity of numbers -- usually a comfort -- wasn't helping the tension in his stomach. This job was going well so far, Merlin's personal crisis of lust notwithstanding. Surely they were due a disaster soon.

Merlin held his breath. Gwen, he was almost sure, was doing the same. Her finger hovered over a trackpad.

Gaius inspected the wrong side of the hilt first, then turned it over and brought the magnifier in close --

"One," Gwen whispered.

\-- and then straightened up, brushing that part of the design with the tip of one dark-gloved finger --

"Two," from Gwen, and almost at once, as her own finger clicked down, " _three_ ," and she leaned back, grabbed at Merlin's hand and squeezed it, grinning all over her face.

***

**CAMELOT HOUSE**

**JANUARY 14th, 2:20pm**

"Another party? You just had one!"

Arthur's look managed to communicate that Merlin was an ignorant and uncultured beetle, whilst simultaneously being, well, a very attractive look. Merlin gritted his teeth and hated the both of them -- himself for having appalling taste, and Arthur for being Arthur.

"That was a Christmas party, Merlin," Arthur said, insultingly slow. "This is entirely different."

"You said you hated parties."

"Oh, well," said Arthur, as though there was some kind of airy self-evident truth in the two words. Merlin wanted to punch him just a little.

"This party has a different guest list," Georgia explained later.

They were hovering in the kitchen listening to Uther and Andrews have what amounted to a very polite argument about menu logistics. Merlin could tell that not many people argued with Uther. Andrews was getting away with it via stealth compromise tactics and heavy-handed use of the word 'sir'.

"Different how?"

"More family." She shrugged. "More titles."

It turned out Arthur's mother had been some kind of distant cousin to royalty, which explained the implausible luxury of the house: Arthur was not only living off my-father-is-an-asshole-lawyer money, but also my-mother-was-aristocracy money. It was becoming rapidly clear that in Uther's opinion, although Arthur was living _off_ this money, he wasn't living _up_ to it.

"Our friends are starting to wonder why you haven't been coming out to the country on weekends quite as often as you did. Perhaps you can explain yourself to them this evening."

Arthur muttered something that sounded like _your friends_ , but his face didn't shift from a mask of polite attention while he did so.

"You are forty-seventh in line to the British throne," Uther went on, with a dark glance that made Merlin wonder if the forty-six people ahead of Arthur in the succession shouldn’t all perhaps be sleeping with a knife under their pillow. "And you do have certain social responsibilities to uphold."

"I understand, Father." He gave a jerk of the head that was almost a bow, and Merlin's chest ached for him, thinking about his own mother and their silly rituals and their huge, embarrassing love, all the things he'd thought came naturally when you were part of a family of two. Merlin wasn't so dense as to think that the Pendragons didn't love one another, but their expressions of it were bafflingly obscure, and there was so much in the _way_.

More family and more titles turned out to mean fancier wine, floors polished until Will and Merlin could have sock races on them and almost break their legs in the process, and Andrews reaching superb heights of rat-a-tat organisation. Merlin had to stash his tablet hurriedly in his backpack when Georgia whirled into the kitchens, her whites smeared with sauce and her hair whipped back into a sleek braid.

"Champagne!" she said.

"I'm not sure that's such a --" began Merlin, just as Will was saying, "Don't mind if I do," and Georgia grabbed them both by their ironed shirt fronts and hissed, " _For the guests_."

Merlin swallowed down his déjà vu and made a fair show of gliding around the room with his tray of drinks. He was glad that the bandage around his fake hand injury had been replaced by a set of small white strips; anything bulkier would make this aspect of the job difficult. Morgana gave him a small wave with the hand not full of canapés -- she'd wrangled an invitation to this one as well -- and once his tray was almost empty, Merlin ended up eavesdropping shamelessly on a group of people wearing clothing that probably cost as much as Gwen's entire arsenal of technology.

Nearby, Arthur -- under his father's approving gaze -- was leading a young woman into the room, his hand tucked companionably through one arm of her black coat. She was unbuttoning the coat with the other hand, looking flushed and bright with the warmth of the house.

Through continued eavesdropping and drink-proffering, Merlin managed to determine that this pleasantly pretty personage was one of the most titled guests at the party: a Lady Dorothea. Which was an oddly old name, Merlin thought, like doilies, or snuff, but there was nothing old about Dot -- which was what everyone seemed to greet her with, but which in turn seemed too young. Her long hair curled at the ends and she had hazel eyes, mischievous behind glasses.

She was a redhead. Arthur looked delighted to see her.

Merlin resented her immediately.

"You're a disgrace," Will said, under his breath.

" _You're_ a disgrace," Merlin said automatically. "What?"

"Robbing. Him. Remember?"

Merlin rubbed his free hand over his face, in case it was doing something he didn't want it to. Arthur was whispering something, his hands illustrating it in expansive motions, and Dorothea had her fingers pressed over her mouth as she laughed.

"I know," Merlin said.

"Plus he's a demanding twit."

"I _know_."

"Then stop looking at him like you're composing a bloody sonnet, and get on with the servitude," Will said -- quite kindly for Will -- and dug his elbow into Merlin's back as he wandered away.

Three voices held a short, complex battle within Merlin: one of them told him to pay attention to Will and be an impeccable server for the rest of the evening, and one of them wanted to get even closer to Arthur so that it could pick a fight. The third one, which was sneaky, suggested a compromise.

"What are you -- here, try under the counter," said Georgia, when Merlin waltzed into the kitchen again and started digging around for the bottles of plain spirits. "Come back when you're done, I've got two trays of prawn wontons almost ready to be sent out."

By the time Merlin emerged with the glass in his hand, tray discarded -- he could have been a guest, except for the black apron -- the Lady Dorothea had moved on and was with Morgana, having her cheeks kissed and her dress exclaimed over. Arthur was standing by himself, near a window, twirling between his fingers one of the toothpicks that had gone out with the paprika meatballs. He didn't notice Merlin's presence until Merlin was very close.

"Vodka tonic," Merlin said, and held it out.

Arthur's fingers slid against his as he took the glass.

"With ice," Arthur noted. He took a single sip.

"Anything else?"

There was a gleam in Arthur's eyes that suggested he was considering an escalating list of cruel possibilities, and the contrary bastard part of Merlin that had led him over here in the first place thought, _bring it on then_. He didn't move and didn't break eye contact, watching Arthur watching him as though composing an argument, gauging limitations, something thoughtful and assured happening behind the bemused curve of Arthur's mouth, wet where the ice had slid against it.

"I don't know what else," said Arthur, "is on offer."

Merlin's ankles wobbled as he tried to stop the blood from rushing to the skin of his face through sheer force of will. This was terrible. This was fantastic. This -- they _knew_ Arthur liked men, they'd stuck it in a fucking _dossier_ \-- but maybe he just meant, maybe Merlin was deluded, _prawn wontons_ , oh God what a mess.

Arthur licked his lips. Merlin's eyes locked onto Arthur's mouth with the speed of a cartoon piano hurtling towards a hapless victim, and Merlin's heart gave a good kick within his chest -- _DISASTER!_ a voice that sounded suspiciously like Gaius's was insisting inside his head. _DISASTER IMMINENT!_

And it was disastrous, Merlin knew, on so many different horrible and dangerous levels. Arthur was looking startled and predatory all at once, and he was leaning closer, and all things considered, doom-ridden piano metaphors were probably quite apt.

"I, um," Merlin said, and was a heartbeat away from adding _I can't, but fuck, I want to_ , when Arthur licked his lips again, this time a distinctly nervous mannerism, and Merlin's body gave him an ultimatum: either escape immediately, or we're jumping him right here. Right now.

Merlin clenched his teeth so hard it hurt, and fled the room.


End file.
